


How to Train a Werewolf

by Guede



Series: Werewolf How-To [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Hale Fire, Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Cock Warming, Dom/sub Undertones, Failwolf, Fisting, House Hunting, Humor, Incest, Knotting, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mildly Dubious Consent, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Rimming, Rough Sex, Sex Magic, Sex Toys, Wedding Planning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 03:20:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5274608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris Argent’s backyard, where Scott and Allison are getting married in a few weeks, is cursed.  Luckily, Stiles specializes in this sort of problem.  Should be an easy fix, and never mind that Chris massively underplays life-threatening everything, Peter’s house-shopping, and Derek is Derek.</p><p>Sequel to <i>How to Bag a Werewolf</i>.</p><p>11/27/15: Added a bonus post-fic scene.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The first time Chris Argent calls Stiles up for help, they talk for two minutes and then Stiles points out that actually, Chris seems to be describing a feng shui set-up. 

Chris is silent for a couple seconds. _“Damn it,”_ he mutters. _“Okay, thanks.”_

And then he hangs up and disappears for a couple weeks.

Well, he doesn’t really disappear, obviously, because if he did, Stiles would know because Allison would be banging down his door, Scott and a couple truckfuls of crossbow bolts in tow, and she isn’t. But he’s not around and Stiles is curious about it for a hot second, and then he forgets about it. Hey, he’s got a busy life, okay? He has his own thriving agri-sex-magic consultancy business, he has a hot werewolf boyfriend, and now he’s got his hot werewolf boyfriend’s equally hot, incredibly pushy werewolf uncle.

“Stiles, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help reading through your financial statements and I really think you’re missing some opportunities on small-business tax credits,” Peter says, snuggling up after sex on the living room floor.

“Oh, no, the accountant’s almost done, but while I was going over the paperwork with him, I think I came up with some ways to reduce the amount of legally required agency oversight you have, if we just do some simple restructuring. I thought we could talk about it over breakfast tomorrow,” Peter says, right before blowing him next to the little overnight bag Peter’s brought along.

“Considering your new potential for expansion, don’t you think you should be looking at new space options? Besides, your landlord right now is so unreasonable about sex on the rooftop patio,” Peter says, sprawling over a fucked-out Derek, both of them flopped on the new oversized, overstuffed sectional Peter’s bought them. “I’ve got a realtor friend who specializes in mixed-use locations.”

Stiles slides his arms across Peter’s back, then props himself up on them. Which makes his hips press down, which moves his cock in Peter so Peter’s eyes go back to rolling in his head and Peter shuts up for a second. Which gives Stiles a chance to reach past him and poke Derek till his boyfriend rouses out of his usual postcoital stupor and growls feebly.

“Don’t even, Derek,” Stiles says. “Your evil uncle is trying to talk us into a new evil overlord headquarters when we’re only a third through our lease.”

Derek’s one visible eye blinks a few times, then closes, right before he smushes his face back into the sectional cushions. “I maybe got the parking garage door jammed open again. But our dick landlord still hasn’t fixed the clicker, and we were going to be late for that meeting with that vineyard. And honestly, Peter’s right about the patio.”

Stiles looks at the back of his boyfriend’s head, which stubbornly refuses to turn. Then he sighs. He moves his hands to either side of the annoyingly sexed-out wolfpile, braces himself, and then pulls out of Peter. Pulls Peter out of Derek while he’s at it, too. Then he shoves Peter over by the hips, ignoring the man’s pitiful whine, grabs Derek’s ass, and drags it over.

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Derek says, hissing, his hips jerking up into Stiles. He paws at the sectional for a second, then semi-puddles under Stiles, letting his ass sink the rest of the way back onto Stiles’ cock. “Okay, okay, so, well, what, you don’t want to move?”

“I didn’t mean to offend you, I honestly just wanted to— _Stiles_ ,” Peter groans, going from wide-eyed concern to really wide-eyed, really lust-glazed concern. Not that he’s pushing away from the fingers Stiles has in him or anything; on the contrary, that little twist of his almost gets him fisted before Stiles pulls back.

“Yeah, I know, you want to help,” Stiles says. He takes a second and watches Peter shudder against the sectional back, because well, it tightens up the man’s pecs and belly really pretty, and makes him swallow really hard, and not paying attention to all that is kind of a crime. “But also, I feel like you want to move in. Actually, I feel like you’ve stealth-migrated already, and what is it with you Hales and just sneaking around on everything? I mean, Derek can’t even say he wants more kouign amann, he just schedules us to meet at your office so he can steal yours.”

Peter opens his mouth, pauses and then shoots Derek a narrow-eyed look. He’s currently the one facing the back of Derek’s head but Derek hunches up anyway.

“I’m not stealing them,” Derek mutters. “They’re out on a tray in your office.”

“Yes, Derek, that’s my inbox tray, not a service platter,” Peter says. He nixes the rest of his rant with obvious effort, then sighs. Rubs some hair out of his eyes and turns an apologetic face on Stiles. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give you the runaround—”

Stiles looks at him.

“—well. Yes. All right. I’m…well, I’m sorry, and I’ll start removing my—ah. Stiles.” Peter twitches because Stiles is hooking his fingers around and doubling down on the man’s prostate. He bites his lip and grabs at the back of the couch, then twitches again, harder, when Stiles starts rubbing around Peter’s hole with the ball of his thumb. “I realize—I am fully aware I made you uncomfortable, there’s really no need to—”

“Oh, my God, I’m not uncomfortable, I’m just annoyed,” Stiles mutters, shifting over. He eases himself across Derek, so he can start fucking into Derek while he’s nibbling at the guy’s tattoo. “Can’t you just _ask_ for closet space?”

Derek’s been a little tense this whole time, but now he lets out a soft little noise and humps back at Stiles. He starts rubbing his cheek against the cushions. “Pretty sure he wants a new bed, too.”

“Well, it’s your place, whatever—whatever you prefer, but—” Peter’s twitching is starting to smooth out into loose hip-rolls, bearing down on Stiles’ busy fingers. He keeps his eyes on Stiles but edges down the back of the sectional so that he’s half-curled over Derek’s arm and side, nuzzling into his nephew’s shoulder, throat arching at Stiles. “—you do seem to like my California King—”

“Because you’re both massive, massive pillow hogs,” Stiles snorts. “Also, God, you’re still not asking, but as long as you don’t touch the equipment and don’t steal my herbs, then yeah, you can m—”

Peter’s grinning before Stiles can even finish, and even with the sleepy-eyed come-hither look over it, because he’s also got Derek turning around to lick at his jaw, it’s a real, honest-no-sarcasm, happy grin. The guy really thought Stiles might not go for it, for some reason, and he’s thrilled that Stiles is. He’s a pushy, manipulative bastard, but lately he’s been making Stiles want to make happy noises at him with disturbing frequency, and of all people, Peter should be picking that ball up and not just running it over the goal line, but swiping it to sell on eBay later.

Anyway. So Stiles decides he doesn’t care because he and Peter are making out, it’s weird but it’s not exactly tops of his priorities right now, and…the phone rings.

It’s Scott. _“Whatever you were doing, don’t be mad and don’t tell me what it was, Stiles, okay, because Allison said yes!”_ he crows.

“Duh,” Stiles mutters. Then he shakes his head, pushes a pouting Peter down onto Derek’s mouth, and assumes a proper best-friend attitude. “I mean, awesome, Scotty! Did you just ask her?”

 _“Yeah. Yeah, I know, I said I was going to wait, but I woke up this morning and she was making breakfast and she had this little smile, you know, the one where…”_ Scott babbles happily.

He’ll go on for a good twenty minutes like that if nobody stops him. And Stiles is busy, but he is also duty-bound to lend his buddy an ear at times like these. So he puts the phone on speaker, mutes his end, and sets the phone back on the coffeetable. And then he screws the hell out of Derek and Peter, because multi-tasking is his wheelhouse.

So Peter semi-moves in (he’s keeping his apartment for overflow storage, because his books and digital art are fine but Stiles agrees with Derek, no statues) and happily starts figuring out ways to get them out of their current lease. Scott and Allison get engaged and set a wedding date for a week after Allison’s graduation. And Chris calls Stiles again.

“Chris _Argent_?” Stiles says, because it is four in the goddamn morning and he is not on a job. If somebody is not paying him to do it, he sees no reason why he needs to activate higher logical functions at this hour.

 _“Yes,”_ Chris says warily. _“Sorry. I know this is early.”_

“Also, you’re calling from Allison’s phone again. Jesus, please tell me you didn’t sneak into her and Scott’s place to take it,” Stiles mutters.

Chris is silent for a second. _“I’m staying with them but…she actually doesn’t know I’m calling you. Look, it’ll make sense once I explain it to you, but can—can we talk now? It’s—”_

“Whatever, call me back on your actual phone,” Stiles says. Then he hangs up. He rubs his hand over his face, wondering whether he should just pull the battery out of his phone, and then he sighs because he’s not going to do that. If only because he’s curious now, which, he really should work on that because it is so fucking _early_ , God. “Derek. Derek. You need to get off my cock.”

Derek snarls into his pillow, because werewolves also hate mornings, and clamps down on Stiles, because werewolves hate mornings so much they _are_ their assholes.

Stiles can’t back out because Peter is curled up behind him, fluffed out into a giant burrito courtesy of the man’s pillow and most of the blankets. Swapping in Peter’s bed has gotten Stiles his own pillow, but not much else. Stupid sandwich-prone werewolves.

“Goddamn it, Derek,” he says, hitting his boyfriend on the shoulder. 

Who doesn’t move. And now Chris is calling him back. Stiles sighs again, but yeah, he’s taking the call because he’s so annoyed it’s not even worth trying to go back to sleep now. He twists his arm back behind him, slaps at the burrito till it moves, and then answers the phone.

 _“It’s me,”_ says Chris. _“And I have no idea what the problem is this time, except that my backyard is a wasteland.”_

Peter grumbles less than Derek, although the pissy look he shoots Stiles as he unravels himself and crawls around to snuggle up to Derek instead could rival any feline bitchface Scott’s clinic posts to its blog. Stiles rolls his eyes at him, hikes out of Derek’s ass—Peter at least does him the favor of thoroughly muffling Derek’s protesting growl—and then shuffles around to get off the bed.

“Wasteland?” Stiles says. “Are you kidding me? You’re calling me because your goddamn sprinkler system broke—”

His phone pings. Chris has texted him a photo.

He looks at it, then puts the phone back to his ear. “Okay, no, I guess wasteland is underplaying it, if anything. But come on, your backyard—”

 _“Is where Scott and Allison are getting married in four weeks,”_ Chris says, with a little edge in his voice.

“Right,” Stiles says, and puts his hand over his eyes. “Fuck. Wait, why are you calling me? Shouldn’t you try—”

Chris takes the kind of deep breath people normally only take if they have high-powered projectile weaponry in their hands and a manifesto in their back pocket. _“Stiles. I have tried five different sod companies, fifteen types of fertilizer, and three hedgewitches. I even tried digging out a corner and trucking in new soil. It’s been a month and none of it has worked.”_

“Okay,” Stiles says after a second. “Okay, let me check the calendar and see when we’re free.”

* * *

Stiles also checks with Lydia, because Stiles knows better than to get anywhere near pre-wedding planning and as best man, he’s already more than fulfilled his obligations by sourcing them out-of-season flowers at a steep discount and swearing that he will deliver Scott to the wedding venue sane, sober, in one piece, and free of any reason to perform heroics for the next twenty-four hours (the moment they hit their honeymoon, they’re on their own). Lydia, on the other hand, is maid of honor. And even if she wasn’t, she’d be in the thick of the planning because there is no way she is going to a wedding if there’s even a chance she’ll be seated against garlands that clash with her hair and across from some vet student nobody.

 _“No, everything’s going fine so far. So what happened, and how many bodies are there?”_ Lydia sighs. She’s also the only one of them who actually is a morning person, although that’s more down to her need to be the first item on anybody’s agenda rather than any real love for that time of day.

“No bodies. Well, that I know of. I still gotta go over and assess. So, uh, how much of a bridezilla is Allison?” Stiles says, stretching back against the headboard.

He’s still in bed, albeit with his laptop so he can check the microclimate and micro-geomagic flux history for the Argent house over the past two months. And with Derek, who’s snuffling at Stiles’ hip, not because he’s even trying to pretend he’s helping, but because Peter finally got up to shower and Derek is a limpet trapped in a badboy body.

 _“She’s not. Actually, she is reasonable to the point of naïve, and if I wasn’t keeping an eye out, we would’ve had to settle for croutons and a veggie dip platter for the hors d’oeuvres. I swear to God, Stiles, those two are going to make this thing look like a high school graduation party,_ Lydia spits out.

The shower turns off. Derek stops snuffling at Stiles’ hip and turns over, but when nothing happens over at the bathroom, he throws another fold of blanket over his head and curls up.

“I thought it was a combo graduation party,” Stiles says.

Lydia seethes audibly at him through the phone. _“It can be a combo rodeo for all I care, but we will have actual glass glasses, Stiles. Not plastic. Not Styrofoam. You understand?”_

“Yep.” So far, weather and ley lines aren’t showing anything weird, so Stiles starts checking news reports and criminal bulletins in case there was something really micro, like a busted sewage pipe or drunken teens messing with Ouija boards next to their mom’s authentic petrified garden gnomes. “Well, great, so if there was, say, a venue—”

 _“The only two things Allison’s insisted on is that she gets final say on the dress and that it’s got to be at her dad’s house.”_ Then Lydia turns so sweet that Stiles can hear his phone creaking from the diabetes that’s swelling it up. _“She teared up when the planner suggested they go with somewhere prettier. It’s supposed to be a sign from her and her father to Scott that they welcome him into their family, werewolf and all. Bygones are bygones, and nobody’s going to be shooting up anybody anymore, even if her aunt and grandfather are still true-crime special staples.”_

“Oh,” Stiles says. By his hip, Derek abruptly bumps into him, rustles a lot, and then grunts. “Okay.”

 _“So whatever is wrong with Chris Argent’s house, you fix it and you fix it good,”_ Lydia hisses. Now his phone’s all staticky with fear. _“Because Allison will cry, and I will have no choice but to tell Scott because I am not crying-on material, Stiles, you know this. And then you and I both know what Scott will do.”_

Stiles puts his face in his hand. “Yeah, yeah. Look into it and accidentally uncover a massive conspiracy to turn all werewolves into puppies or whatever, and then we’ll have to save the world again.”

 _“Good. So you’ll fix it?”_ Lydia says, all sugar again.

“Yeah,” Stiles mutters. He hangs up, rubs his forehead some more, and then looks over. “Okay, Derek, you kind of have to get up now, don’t make me—oh. Morning, Peter.”

Peter makes a sort of throaty acknowledging noise, because his mouth is full of Derek’s cock, and Derek’s got his wrists pinned to the bed. At some point he eeled himself from the bathroom and into Derek’s blanket cocoon, and now he’s efficiently sucking Derek to full awareness. His hair sends trickles of water all over Stiles’ hand when Stiles runs that through the messy curls, and he deliberately adds an extra flourish to his towel-clad ass’s perky bobbing.

So Stiles flips over behind him and has a quick frot, because whatever, towel means Peter’s cleaning him up as he rubs off. Derek’s already groping under the towel, so Stiles lets him get Peter off. Then he shoves Derek off the bed, before the guy can try and fall asleep again, and glowers up at Peter. “No, you’re not going.”

Peter holds up his hands so his towel, which was barely clinging on by virtue of sheer dampness anyway, falls off of him. Cheap shot bastard that he is. “Stiles, why on earth would I want to go to Chris Argent’s house?”

“Because you two have that regular drunk date?” Derek grumbles, picking himself up off the floor. He tosses the blankets he’d taken with him back onto the bed, then stalks into the walk-in.

“That wasn’t at his house, that was at the bar across the street from my office, and that was only while we were sorting out Gerard’s estate,” Peter sniffs. “I haven’t seen him in months, and I certainly haven’t seen his house. Well. With his permission.”

“ _Whatever_ you were doing with him,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes. “You’re not going, because he’s zoned for residential-slash-small business, not agriculture, so all of my permits are useless. And we need those quick because Scott and Allison—”

“I already texted my paralegal to start doing the research, come by for lunch and I should have an idea of who we need to speak to,” Peter says. He picks up his towel with a faintly disappointed sigh, because nobody’s jumping him, and then pads into the closet just as Derek emerges from it. “Hard to estimate since these come up so rarely, but I’ll see if we can get them issued this week.”

Derek has jeans on, fly open, and a grey shirt thrown over his shoulder. He pauses for a kiss and a nuzzle, then ducks into the bathroom. “Did he say what the deal was?” he calls back. “Did he kill something?”

“No idea,” Stiles says. “We’re gonna have to do a full work-up, I think. I guess I’ll call Matthews and push back his appointment, weather out there this week was looking dodgy anyway. Ugh, but we had that hearing at city hall, too.”

Peter pops his head out. “The one with the zoning board? Why don’t you just let me handle that?”

“Out of the goodness of your heart,” Stiles says. “When you’re closing that deal on Thursday.”

“Stiles, I’m a partner in a firm, I have minions to deal with that,” Peter says dismissively. “And of course I would love to get more insight into Derek and your day-to-day, I’ve been saying for a while that I’d like to ride along on a case and this does sound interesting. On top of it being Chris. But he’s your client. How you handle him, or don’t, is entirely up to you.”

“But I thought you liked him?” Derek yells from the bathroom.

“I like how he fills out jeans and a work-shirt,” Stiles says. Then he sighs and picks up his phone again, and gets started on rearranging his appointments. “I don’t really know the guy, Derek. I spent the first year being pissed at him because he was making Scott miserable, and then Scott told me I wasn’t allowed to mess with him anymore because they were trying to make nice, and I’ve just been checking his ass out ever since. But anyway, getting my buddy his wedding venue comes first. So put a hold on those hatesex plans, okay? First we gotta see what we’re dealing with.”

* * *

“So.” Stiles scratches his head. “Uh. This is…”

Derek coughs into his shoulder, then gives in and digs the dust mask out of their bag, and holds it over his nose and mouth. “You killed something, right?”

The backyard is a wasteland. That is, in fact, the perfect word for it, because it’s definitely not a desert. Deserts still have plants. Deserts still have soil, even if it’s got shitty water- and nutrient-retention qualities. The stuff they’re standing on is thin and grey and gritty, and looks especially lifeless compared to the lush green trees in the neighboring yards. Although, Stiles notes, none of those trees hang over the clapboard fence. In fact, it’s like they’ve been vertically leveled off at the fenceline by somebody with a lot more precision than your usual homeowner with a chainsaw, however topiary-obsessed they might be.

He goes over to check it out, and has to dig around for several minutes before he turns up the remains of a branch. Which turns to dust as soon as he touches it, and then nobody would’ve ever guessed it existed, what with the uniform lunarscape and all.

“…dryad? Or a Huldrekall?” Derek’s asking a very pinched-face Chris, when Stiles gets back to them.

Stiles kicks Derek’s ankle, because okay, bad family history and also general werewolf-hunter animosity, but they’ve got Chris’ completed intake questionnaire and signed liability waivers in their bag, along with a cashier’s check for the full down payment (Stiles was actually going to offer a discount, but Chris just shoved it over and looked so murderous about it that Stiles figures he’ll put the money towards the next time Allison calls him over wilting wolfsbane). So the guy is officially a client, and they have standards to maintain.

“Okay, so along with the soil cores and the ley line check I mentioned, I think we’d better do some basic detection casting,” Stiles says. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions, there are a couple possibilities besides—”

“It’s a curse,” Chris says grimly. “I killed somebody. But I can’t figure out which curse it is.”

Derek is shooting a knew-it look that Stiles is ignoring, because damn it, _he_ is a professional, at least. “You’re sure?”

“Well, the darach said my fields would be as barren as my heart, right before I shot her in the head,” Chris says. He gestures at the yard behind them. “And then I came home and saw this.”

“Oh. Okay.” Stiles glances at Derek, who’s tensed up and is staring very hard at Chris, but who doesn’t seem in immediate danger of storming off. He edges over to the other man anyway, and presses their hips together while he pulls out his tablet. “All right, then. You said on the phone that you’d gone to some other people already?”

“Yeah, and I wrote down all the analysis spells that they did, and the results.” Chris hands them a folded piece of paper. 

Then he steps back and looks at his yard. The muscle in his cheek twitches and he rubs at it, then rubs his hand over the top of his head. It is still way, way too damn early, because morning appointments are easiest to shift because nobody wants to get up for them, but the sunlight is doing nice things to the crinkles around Chris’ eyes. Even if he looks like he’s force-feeding himself concrete.

Stiles gets hold of himself, because this is a _job_ , damn it, and looks over the paper. So does Derek, though he just glances at it before stooping down and getting out the sample tubes and the coring equipment. “Need to vary the pattern any?” he asks.

“Nah,” Stiles says. As generalists, hedgewitches are a mixed bag for something niche like this, but based on the list it looks like at least one of them was smart enough to check for emotional triggers as well as ecological ones. “So…while Derek’s doing that, you mind if we go inside and talk?”

Chris shrugs and gestures for Stiles to go in front of him. It’s a pretty nice house, although the little bit Stiles sees is very…well, it’s not a wasteland, but Stiles has seen jail cells with more furniture, and when Allison, her indecisiveness aside, is a regular housewares shopping buddy of Lydia’s. 

They go into the sunroom at the back of the house, which is slightly less empty than the rest of the place: a couple chairs, drying rack in one corner, a box of gun-cleaning tools and a box full of hunting magazines in the other. The rack has a couple flowerpots of wolfsbane by it, which are dried-up but not powder.

“That’s not the yard, that was this other curse,” Chris says, watching him. “Which I had broken, no need to worry about that.”

“Still, if you’ve got the curse-breaker’s report, I’d like to see it. Also, your front yard looks okay,” Stiles says, noting both things down. “From what you said she said, she wasn’t that specific. How many sacrifices did the darach rack up?”

“Three, but she was working off a sapling Nemeton, not the full-grown stump that Blake had.” Chris gives Derek a passing look through the window, then steps into the main part of the house. He’s just gone for a couple seconds, and when he comes back, he has a handful of thick files that he offers to Stiles. “Curse-breaker’s report on top, and then the darach’s police reports if you need those.”

Stiles mulls it over for a moment. Curses are the crazy uncle of magic and the slightest thing can end up being the key to them, so he never wants to turn down information.

“Is that going to bother him?” Chris says, nodding at Derek. Speaking of what’s on the other hand.

Weirdly enough, he sounds sort of uncomfortable himself, like he didn’t want to bring it up, and he wasn’t even involved in the whole Blake deal. “We’ll deal with it,” Stiles mutters, taking the files. He’ll just scan them soon as they get home and send the hard copies straight back to Chris; Derek can’t open a file by mistake if they’re on Stiles’ laptop. Then he frowns. “You did actually kill her, right?” 

Now Chris looks offended. “I know what I’m doing, Stiles.”

“Never hurts to check, and I charge extra if I have to deal with the client’s life problems,” Stiles says, shrugging. He flips briefly through the files, but nothing catches his eye. “Did she say anything else?”

“Not really,” Chris says.

Stiles looks at him. “Okay, seriously, you’re the professional hunter, I’m the professional magic worker, can you please not make me lecture you about being vague?”

Chris opens his mouth, then sighs. He puts his hand up to the side of his face like he’s getting a headache. “Yeah, sorry, it’s just…honestly, I don’t think it’s useful. I got her file, drove out, cornered her. She was still trying to play dumb and asked why I’d want to hurt her, I said something along the lines of, you’re a darach and you kill kids, and then she tried to kill me with termites so I shot her.”

“But she had time to curse you,” Stiles says.

“I had to shoot her twice,” Chris says, looking a little embarrassed. “First time, I slipped on the termites and just hit her arm. They got kind of…slippery underfoot.”

Well, Stiles has to admit he’s been there. Not with the killing the darach with guns bit—he prefers mudslides, darachs never seem to remember that they’re only good for animals and not the rest of nature—but dealing with squished bug slicks, yeah. And they take forever to wash off sneakers afterward.

“Moving on. Did she know you?” Stiles says. When Chris shakes his head, Stiles raises his hand. “I don’t mean did she know you were coming after her. Did she know you personally? As in, would she know that Allison has her heart set on the backyard?”

Chris winces at ‘Allison’ but seems to be genuinely thinking hard on it. “I really doubt it,” he finally says. “I mean, I don’t know everybody that Allison’s friends with, but this was up in Oregon and they called me in because they thought she wouldn’t recognize me on sight.”

Which Stiles dutifully writes down, but so far he really should just be writing dumb bad luck because hell if he knows how the darach did it. That yard looks like somebody did a very complex, tightly-targeted spell, with days of personalizing prep work, but unless Chris is outright lying, which he’s got no reason to unless it turns out he’s a pod person and therefore doesn’t operate by Earth logic, it sounds like the actual casting was just a moment of panic.

“So how bad is it?” Chris asks.

“I have no idea,” Stiles says honestly. He looks at the yard, where Derek is already so covered in dust that he looks like a giant dust bunny with a great ass. “I still want to do some casting today, and then we’ll send to the lab for some work-ups—”

Chris makes a frustrated noise. It’s surprisingly growly, and when Stiles looks over, Chris winces. Then he jabs his hand irritably at the yard. “Stiles, I can’t hide this from Allison forever.”

“You’ve done it for a month so far, haven’t you?” Then Stiles sighs. Not because he feels sorry for Chris, what with the way the guy’s glaring at him like he _isn’t_ the best hope for fixing it, but because he knows damn well where this is going. “I’m not handling her, okay? She’s your daughter. Look, I already talked to Lydia, and I’ll talk to Scott too and see if we can keep her busy with cake tastings or something. But don’t expect a lot from me on that. I mean, I’m not even gonna tell Scott full details, all right?”

“Well, of course not, he can’t lie worth a damn,” Chris mutters, which Stiles, much as he loves Scott, cannot object to. He purses his lips a few times, then gives Stiles a tight nod. Then he tucks his chin down towards his chest and rubs at his temple again. “I…thank you. I really appreciate this. I don’t want to be the one who ruins the day for her.”

“Believe me, I get that,” Stiles says. Then he turns off his tablet and sticks it under his arm with the autopsy files. “Okay, so go do…hunting things, or whatever, and Derek and I are going to get to that detection casting.”

* * *

“These results are so weird.” Stiles looks at the meter in his hand, then blows out an aggravated sigh and lets his head fall against Derek’s chest. Then he makes a face and pulls his head back up, because one, that moondust seriously gets everywhere, and two, even on Derek, it is not appealing to taste, feel, or even look at. Somehow this dead darach has found the one thing on this earth that makes Derek unsexy. “I don’t even know what to do with this. Are you sure we grabbed the right box?”

“Yeah, I’m sure, I calibrated all of these last weekend.” Derek’s fiddling with the meter in his hand and looking just as pissed off as Stiles feels.

He gives his meter a last poke, then no-hands folds them up into a sitting position, absently wrapping his legs around Stiles’ waist so Stiles doesn’t slip out. His breathing hitches a little as he scrabbles for the data notebook, but that’s not in the least a sign of exertion. And yeah, okay, werewolf strength and flexibility, it’s a turn-on.

Sadly, not enough of one to overcome Stiles’ exasperation at the numbers he is, with the greatest reluctance, reading off to Derek. They’re so off he might as well just make up crap, for all that he’ll be able to do anything with them.

“You done?” Chris says. Practically on top of them.

His brows twitch slightly as they yelp—well, fine, Stiles yelps, Derek does a manly hiss—and then twist around to look at him, but otherwise he just…seems really unconcerned with two people still semi-fucking in his yard. He doesn’t even look at Derek’s popped claws and fangs.

“With the casting, yeah, why? Did you have plans for a garden party or something?” Stiles snaps. Maybe a little nasty of him, but he doesn’t like being startled. Usually clients just wait for him to call them up—okay, normally he’s also working in very rural areas of very rural property, and he didn’t actually tell Chris to leave them alone, but you’d think that’d be implied. “What’s the rush?”

“Not really a rush, it’s just that stuff sets up like glue if you leave it too long,” Chris says. And holds out a roll of paper towels and a bottle of adhesive solvent.

Derek sniffs at the bottle, then has to turn his head and blow the dust out of his nose, even though they’re both wearing dust masks now. Which had been kind of a problem for getting an erection, not a look Stiles likes, and come to think of that…the dust is mixing with their sweat to get unusually sticky. Stiles mutters a cleaning cantrip and it doesn’t seem to do anything.

So he takes the paper towels and bottle, which Chris has been patiently holding the whole time. “Thanks,” he says. “So…we need to go crunch the numbers. We’ve got a client meeting this afternoon and the labs will be a few days and that’s only if I bribe them with alcohol, but I’ll work on the castings tonight. We’ll call you when we have something.”

“All right,” Chris says, and goes back inside.

* * *

“You think she cursed him with eternal poker face too?” Stiles says, reworking his ley line chart. “I mean, sure, Derek wasn’t looking his best, but still.”

Derek cuts off the last strip of tape with his claws, then carefully smooths it over the package of soil cores. “He didn’t smell of anything either.”

“He’s a hunter, if he gave anything away he wouldn’t have lasted past his first hunt. Probably just a masking talisman,” Peter says, nibbling thoughtfully at his claw. He tilts his iPad towards Stiles. “What about this one? Split-level, unfinished basement, three-car garage _and_ they have tiled floors in the kitchen so the blood’ll just mop right off.”

Stiles glances over. “That’s two streets down from the dean. Way too close, he’ll be over bugging me for shit all the time.”

“We could speak to him,” Peter says, like butter would stay pristinely solid in his mouth.

Derek goes and puts the package by the door, so he’ll remember to get it in the morning, and then swings by the kitchen to grab himself and Stiles beers, and Peter one of the little whiskey tester bottles Stiles brought back from his last conference. “Tried that, he’s half-fae, he just sparkles at you so it feels like your eyes are bleeding.”

Peter sighs and swipes that listing away. “All right, nix that whole neighborhood. Did anything come up when you looked at anchor points?”

“Besides that it’s personal? Not really. Well, I mean, I got stuff but they all contradict each other,” Stiles says. He stares at the stupid chart for another second, then grabs it up and flops back on the sectional next to Peter. “See? Either Chris is actually secretly swapping places with his evil twin, or we’re doing something wrong, or…I don’t know.”

“Interesting,” Peter says, looking the chart over. He cracks open the sample bottle and sips from it, then makes a face. Then he steals Derek’s beer to get the taste out of his mouth. “Nix that, too, disgusting. It’s like they were distilling through their boots. Anyway, what’s that plus-minus on the polarity reading?”

“It kept flipping around,” Derek tells him. He takes back his beer and swigs at it. “Switched about once a second.”

Peter looks up and at the far wall, and gets that faintly hazy look that means he’s mentally cross-referencing something. “Where does Chris keep his guns? Well, never mind, his acreage isn’t that big, even if it’s across the house…”

“No idea, why—oh.” Stiles hits himself in the forehead. “Crap. I totally forgot, yeah, that much metal that close would throw off things, and I even saw his cleaning kit. Damn it, this is why I don’t work residential.”

Derek’s already pulled out his phone. “So we have to redo them? We’re free…after three tomorrow.”

“Okay, I’ll see if that works for Chris,” Stiles says, reaching for his phone.

* * *

It does indeed work for Chris, so Stiles and Derek show up the next day to do everything over again, with their gear shielded against the ferromagnetic interference of a nearby private armory of firearms. 

“But these are still all weird,” Stiles mutters. He puts down the meter and then reaches out for the nearest probe.

The damn thing is just a little out of reach, no matter how he stretches, and Derek’s not moving because he’s still trying to get at one of the candles, which has shifted in the dust and is threatening to topple over and ruin an entire hour’s worth of set-up. They do the tug of war thing for a couple seconds, and then Stiles just sighs and wills down his knot, and pulls out of Derek.

He crawls over and gets the probe, and tries inserting it in a couple different spots, all of which yield equally improbable readings. Stiles squats there and holds the damn thing and wonders why the fuck he has to land an X-Files in his best friend’s fiancée’s father’s backyard, and then—backyard.

“Stiles,” Chris says, a couple minutes later.

“I’m wearing pants, I’m not going to get you a public indecency cite, and a couple minutes of shirtlessness isn’t going to reduce your property values that much,” Stiles says, shoving the probe into a corner of Chris’ perfectly grassy, Americana front yard.

Readings are completely normal. Stiles pulls out the probe and swivels on his feet and then sticks it into Chris’ neighbor’s yard. Still normal.

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Chris says. When Stiles looks up, the other man just points behind Stiles, at the…now-dead spots where Stiles’ bare feet have tracked the moondust. “I just was going to ask if you could—”

Except those dead spots have dead bits of grass in them, not grey sand. “Here, hold this,” Stiles says, shoving the probe and meter at Chris.

He jogs back to their bags, grabs the lube, and oils up his hand. Derek’s already coming over and when Stiles turns, he’s dropped and spread his legs. One quick handjob later, Stiles has enough precome on his hand. He lets go of Derek’s cock, ignoring the wistful whine—Derek’s professional but not a martyr, which, to be honest, Stiles likes very much, it’s a nice soundtrack to work to—and then has second thoughts. So he digs up a cock ring and pops it on Derek, and then hurries back out front.

Just as he suspected, a dribble of precome and a quick reviving charm, and the grass there comes back to life like nothing ever happens. He starts to get up and then realizes Chris is still standing there. With the meter and probe.

“Oh, great, thanks. No, no, keep the meter, my hand’s dirty,” Stiles says, grabbing the probe. He sticks it back in the ground and the reading is totally mundane, too.

So…Stiles still doesn’t know what’s going on, but he’s starting to get some ideas. He pulls the probe out and goes back to the backyard, where Derek is still sprawled out on the ground, panting. Derek looks up, blinks hard, and then starts to get to his feet.

“What, no, stay down, I think I got it.” Stiles drops to his knees in front of Derek, giving him a quick kiss as he tries to say something, and jabs the probe into the dirt by them while he’s at it. Then he takes off his pants, grabs Derek by the hips and slides back into the other man.

Derek makes a very weird, choked, kind of urgent noise, except not like his usual urgent fuck-me- _now_ noises. But he’s moving into Stiles, shoving his ass down so that Stiles can get his knot back up as quick as possible, so Stiles doesn’t pay any attention to it and instead scrabbles over Derek to get at the meters and probes behind him.

He gets two of them reset, then loses his balance because Derek is jerking around him. Stiles ends up with one hand on a probe and the other on Derek’s cock, and oh, right. He slips off the cock ring, since he’s not going to need any more precome right now. Gives Derek a couple nice tight pulls, finishing with a good rub of his palm over Derek’s cock head, and then leans over and bites Derek’s neck while tipping one meter so he can also watch it.

So Derek comes, and the meter display…actually gives Stiles a number he can believe. “Huh. Okay, at least we know it’s tied up in the geolocation and not the geology,” he says.

“So what does that mean?” Chris says.

Chris is right next to them. Why is he right next to them, and why did Derek let that happen _again_.

“I was trying to say,” Derek mutters in Stiles’ ear.

Stiles looks at Derek, who’s still shivering a little from his orgasm, all bitten lip that hasn’t healed yet, flushed skin, and then he sighs. He looks up at Chris, who doesn’t even bat an eye as he tilts up the meter in his hand. Because right, those probes aren’t wireless, cool as that would be, and the wire connecting them to the meter is only about a yard long.

“Do you want this back now?” Chris says. He’s looking right down at them, and he could be asking about the sugar bowl, for all the excitement he’s showing.

“Sure,” Stiles finally says. He takes the meter. With…well, both his hands are dirty now.

Without changing expression, Chris pulls a tissue from his pocket, doses it from a travel bottle of sanitizer, and then wipes off his hand. “So if it’s geolocalized…I thought we knew that. It’s just here, nowhere else.”

“No, we knew it was in your backyard, but it could’ve been the—okay, layman terms, I didn’t know whether the problem was in the soil or in the magical influences, and now I know it’s with the magic,” Stiles says. “I’m not saying I know what the problem is, but that narrows it down a lot.” 

“Oh, well, that’s good,” Chris says. He doesn’t exactly brighten, but he does look much more interested. “So now what?”

“More tests, we’ll call you,” Stiles says. He reaches out and hooks his arm around Derek’s neck, pulling him up from his half-sit.

Still not so much as a blink from Chris. “Okay. You need more—”

“No, we have our own,” Derek says, pulling out wet wipes and solvent. He smiles toothily up at Chris. “I think we got it from here, thanks.”

“Okay,” Chris says, and then he goes back into the house.

* * *

Stiles gets off the phone with the librarian and then slews around to look at Derek. “How can you not be freaked out? _I’m_ freaked out, and I’ve had sex with robots that were less robot-y than him.”

Both Derek and Peter stare at Stiles for a moment. Then Peter raises a finger, Derek shrugs defensively, and Peter rolls his eyes and leans over to give Derek a reassuring nuzzle on the cheek.

“I’m sure the robots hardly constitute competition,” Peter says to Derek. “Also, what do you have against swimming pools? We live in California.”

“We live in _northern_ California,” Derek says back. He flicks the real estate flyer at Peter and then looks at Stiles. “I’m pretty sure he’s not a robot, Stiles. He’s got a heartbeat. Maybe he’s just not into watching two guys.”

“He’s into it,” Peter says, and shrugs off Derek’s slightly disgusted face. “I admit that there was a large quantity of alcohol involved, but not so much that he was confused about what I was doing with that bartender.”

Derek opens his mouth, then closes it, shakes his head and just picks up another flyer. “This one.”

“Has shoddy workmanship, you can tell by how the addition and the original house don’t match up, it’ll skew all of Stiles’ runework,” Peter says. “Stiles, is there any reason why you’d want Chris to show some, ah, personal interest? Because if I’m not mistaken, you just wanted to run this as a job.”

“Well, yeah, because it _is_ a job, and you weirdo werewolves aside, I don’t normally use my projects as a way to get sex,” Stiles says. He twists back to his laptop and checks his email for the umpteenth time to see if those interlibrary scans he ordered last night have come through. If he can’t get true priority on his requests, then he really doesn’t see why he shouldn’t up his image licensing fee with the university when his contract’s up at the end of the year. “It’d just be reassuring to see a reaction. A sign that he’s still the guy who invited Scott to dinner so he could explain in detail how he handcrafts his wolfsbane bullets, when _Allison_ was the one who didn’t want to wait.”

“Well, I guess he could be possessed. He’s been kind of polite,” Derek says, shuffling through more flyers. Then he looks at Peter. “Hasn’t even mentioned you once.”

“If that was supposed to be a dent in my self-esteem, Derek, let me assure you that I haven’t been pining over Chris Argent’s lack of attention,” Peter says. His voice is all lofty but he’s watching Derek a little sharply to be just making fun.

Derek glances over, then snorts. His shoulders loosen up a little, and Stiles absently checks Peter’s hands and is not at all surprised that one’s gone missing in the vicinity of Derek’s ass. “I meant how Laura and Mom say he’s always complaining about you. But he usually avoids me, so maybe it’s just more of that.”

“Hey, it’s not weird for you, is it?” Stiles says. “I mean, going to his house?”

“What? No. If I minded, I would’ve said,” Derek says. He looks up from the flyers and his shoulders are pulling up again, with an extra dollop of guilty eyes, like it’s his fault Kate Argent gave him traumatic memories of certain locations around town. “We could spritz holy water on him next time we’re over if that’d make you feel better.”

“If he _was_ possessed, he’d be talking about me,” Peter says firmly. His hand has reappeared on Derek’s thigh, and is inching its way towards Derek’s belt-buckle. And judging from the little smirky tilt of his mouth, he’s totally expecting Stiles to pick up on it. “Well, anyway, if it’s geolocalized, does that mean you’ll be ramping up for a purification?”

Stiles checks his inbox again. Empty. He could boot up his chart-making software, check some astrological alignments.

Or he could shut his laptop and get himself over to the couch, because Derek’s lost patience with the whole slow-grope thing and has just pushed Peter over to stick a hand down his uncle’s pants. Derek’s still got a thing for Peter fucking him, but he’s more open-minded than the limited wardrobe would suggest and Stiles (and Peter, who ultimately likes anything that ends with him blissed-out) is very happy to encourage that. So yeah, sure, switch up the wolfpile. It’s all good.

“I think so, but I wanna wait on the labs,” Stiles says after round one. He nibbles at the back of Derek’s neck, then eases out of the man, giving him a kiss on one shoulderblade. Squeezes his buttocks till Derek gets the hint, and removes himself so Stiles can just slide right into Peter, who’s still nice and slickly open. “Your question? About purification? Hey, the new permits will cover that, right?”

Peter moans and shivers and _almost_ scratches up the new sectional. A flicker of annoyance crosses his face as he curls up his fingers under his head. “Permits.” He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them, and they’re still pretty hazed-over. “I. Oh. No, should be fine. Well, as long as you aren’t doing anything outside of the federally-approved list, and if you are, I think I’d advise that you invest instead in a—Stiles. This. Isn’t really. Optimal. Advising con—conditions.”

“Whatever, this isn’t really ethical either but I think everybody’s standards are slipping on that one,” Stiles mumbles, because he’s just gone ahead and started sucking at the throat Peter is so considerately arching at him. “Great, good to know. Just need to check his privacy wards, see if they’ll last that long. You know, I kind of wonder if Chris just paid off his neighbors or something? They’re never home.”

“Actually, the one on the left’s for sale,” Derek says, shifting around somewhere to Peter’s side. 

Stiles stops sucking at Peter. “It is? That’s a good neighborhood, really close to—but it’s next to Chris.”

“So? Not like he scares us. But it’s got a lot of trees, I don’t know if you’d get enough sun for the drying racks,” Derek says. Then he snorts and the amount of smug in his voice goes up exponentially. “Don’t look like that, I _told_ you he does this.”

Peter…doesn’t really get that grumble rolling around in his throat to come out, because Peter is busy twisting over and biting Derek’s arm, like the savage bloodthirsty asshole he is under that tailored-suit, fancy pastry-eating exterior. The two of them squabble over Stiles’ head for a second, and then Stiles, still working at Peter’s throat, gives up and slaps Derek on whatever’s nearest. Scoops his hands under Peter’s ass and hikes it up to get another inch of cock into the man.

“Okay,” Stiles says, now that they’re both whimpering. “So lab results, permits, schedule the follow-up consult with Chris, good to go. Get it all wrapped up by the weekend. I shouldn’t even have to tell Scott at this rate.”

* * *

“Stiles! Hey!” Scott says, waving from Chris’ porch. “What are you doing here?”

Chris is glowering at Stiles over Scott’s shoulder, because it’s apparently Stiles’ fault that his best friend has a life and mind of his own. Sure, Stiles promised to talk to the guy, but he assumed that Chris would understand calling Scott immediately and mysteriously hinting that he needs to stay away from the Argent house isn’t going to work. Sometimes the fact that reverse psychology works like a dream on Scott is great, and sometimes it’s just a pain.

“Hey, Scotty,” Stiles says. “What are you doing here? I thought Lydia said you lovebirds were looking at garland mock-ups today?”

All true, because obviously Stiles _immediately_ called Lydia and gave her the full rundown, followed by an offer of whatever wine is sitting in Stiles’ client-gifts box to deflect Lydia’s bad mood away from Stiles’ end of the phone line. And after some muttering about stupid hunter trouble-magnets, Lydia went off to scream at the DJ auditions and has been texting Stiles daily wedding plan updates ever since, because she too understands that best results come when you let the professionals do what they are professional about.

“Uh, yeah, we were. Are.” Scott winces and ducks into a furtive little slouch. “I’m actually supposed to get back there, the garlands look great, but there was some screw-up with the measurements…”

He consults a paper. His brow furrows. Then he looks hopefully up at Stiles, who sighs and takes the slip and does some mental calculations after deciphering Scott’s shitty handwriting. “It’s a seven-foot repeater, the backyard’s one-twenty by two-sixty-three, you’re gonna have space at the ends but can’t they fill that with a corner piece or something?”

“Oh! Good idea! I should tell Allison, she was really into that garland.” Scott brightens. He also reaches for his phone, but Stiles intercepts that hand to push the slip of paper back into it, and also subtly nudges Scott off the porch at the same time.

Derek’s still on the porch steps and he does his usual psycho grin, neck-cracking thing at Scott, who is _not_ intimidated, thank you, he’s dragged _Stiles_ through scarier, but he is so preoccupied with screwing up his face at Derek’s posturing that he doesn’t notice he’s down onto the front path and well on his way back to his car.

“Thanks, Stiles!” he says, with a wave. “Hey, are we—”

“Yep, still on for dinner! Tell Allison the menu’s got those bourbon glazed dates she likes!” Stiles calls back. He watches Scott drive off, then blows out his breath.

“So you couldn’t text us a warning because,” Derek says.

When Stiles turns around, Chris has reset his usual Scott-facing dour father expression to mildly aggravated. Once Stiles gets over the fact that it’s an actual _expression_ on the guy’s face, he has to admit it’s also a good look for him, with that jawline and slight stubble. “He caught me outside,” Chris says. “I was taking out the trash and my phone’s still in the house. Isn’t he still going to wonder why you’re here?”

“Yeah, but now he’s gone and we still have half a workday so I can ignore him till we think of a decent alibi,” Stiles says. “Scott’s my buddy, okay, I love him, and I will totally use his flaky moments against him.”

Chris considers that, then, surprisingly, gives Stiles an approving nod. “Okay, well, come inside,” he says. He starts to gesture for them to follow, then twitches a little as something on his hand catches his eye. “You said you got the results back?”

And then he doesn’t hide his hand, although he’s holding it down by his side in an unnaturally stiff pose. Stiles pokes Derek and nods at it; Derek doesn’t even waste time looking confused, just leans forward and peers the moment Chris turns to open the front door.

“You weren’t doing any rituals without us, were you?” Derek suddenly says. He’s still frowning at Chris’ hand. “You don’t know what it is, you could screw it up even—”

“No. I haven’t touched it at all. I’m not a mage but I’m not stupid, either,” Chris snaps, swinging open the front door. He glares at them like he’s kicking them out.

So Stiles stops where he is, and Derek stops right next to him. They stare at each other, and then Chris sighs. Lifts that hand again, almost rubs his face with it. Then he catches himself. He looks at it, then digs at something under one of his nails. Dried blood.

“I was butchering a deer in the garage,” he says. He steps out of the way, then gives them a look that’s half-inquiring, half-challenging. “Just to eat. I was pretty sure that wouldn’t screw up anything.”

“Well, that shouldn’t, but you didn’t kill it here, right?” Stiles asks.

Chris’ mouth twitches. “I think the neighborhood association would object to me driving a live deer here, if the deer didn’t. My SUV’s back isn’t that big.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Just checking. Okay, so where do you want to do this?”

So Chris leads them through the house (new parts just as bare, it’d remind Stiles of a hotel, except even fleabait motels have signs of use like stains) to the sunroom. Those couple pots of wolfsbane are gone, Stiles idly notes. Also, there are strips of meat on the drying rack. Derek takes a big whiff, then settles back, so Stiles is guessing it’s venison like Chris said. It makes the room smell like a jerky factory, but Stiles lives with werewolves and regularly works on cattle ranches, so he can deal with it, though he’s definitely passing on his dry cleaner’s de-scenting fee to Chris.

“Here are the results. That’s your copy, you can keep it,” Stiles says as he hands it over. “Feel free to ask me follow-up questions on any section later, but right now, I want to point out pages two and five. The rest of the report’s basically either ruling out stuff, or confirming that this is de-consecrated land—”

“What?” Chris says. Then he looks a little…well, he’s not going to take it back but he does look like he wishes he’d done that differently, and not just because Derek’s cracking knuckles at him. “Look, this spot isn’t anything special. I checked when we bought it. There’s no old Spanish mission, Native American burial ground, pioneer church, or anything.”

“I don’t mean literally de-consecrated, I mean—” Stiles’ phone buzzes, but it’s Scott so he just thumbs it to silent “—the opposite of consecrated.”

“You mean cursed,” Chris says dryly. “Which we already knew.”

So much for a well-informed client making a better one. “Scientific confirmation is what got us out of the Dark Ages, and look, do you want to know how we’re going to fix it or not?” 

Chris is going to say something, and then he just sighs and bends over to flip to page two. His eyes flick over it and he flips to page five before Stiles can start explaining, then goes back to page two. Then skips to page ten, where his brows tick up slightly.

“And yeah, we remember your list of what the hedgewitches did, but they’re working aboveground, which kind of limits what purification rituals they can do. I work both in and over the ground,” Stiles says, right as somebody pulls up in the driveway.

“I’m not expecting any—” Chris pauses, then swears. He must have remote security wards, pretty nifty for somebody not in spec-ops; Stiles doesn’t really think of the guy as handy with magic, as opposed to knowledgeable, but he makes a mental note to check into it. “Scott’s back.”

“Oh, fine, stay there, I’ll handle him,” Stiles says, getting up. “Derek, can you talk him through the herbal testing?”

“Yeah.” Derek holds up his report and wiggles it at Chris. “Go back to page two.”

Chris…looks amazingly like a sulky five-year-old, considering he’s a badass hunter and all, but he turns to the right page. Which makes Derek smirk like a four-year-old with all the toys, but whatever, Stiles isn’t a grade school teacher and even if he was, he’d definitely be the guy who ditches recess monitoring for free coffee in the breakroom.

Anyway, he’s got Scott to deal with. His best friend’s halfway up the porch when Stiles comes out, and has his game face on. “Stiles, what’s going on?” he says. “Why are you over here? I thought we said no more sending Chris on pointless hunts.”

“Okay, one, none of those hunts were ever truly pointless. They might not have been as serious as, say, murder, but having a pixie infestation constantly turning your sugar into a psychedelic substance is _completely_ a legit issue,” Stiles says. “Two, garlands? Allison?”

Scott holds his phone up. “Texted her, she’s finalizing with the florist and we don’t have bridesmaid dress fittings for two hours. Now give.”

Stiles pulls an offended face. “You sound like you think I’m torturing the guy.”

“You once coordinated fake Sasquatch sightings in three towns to keep him out for nine straight hours,” Scott says.

“And you said that was the best first-date anniversary day you and Allison ever had,” Stiles says. He glances over his shoulder—he’s left the front door slightly ajar to break the privacy wards, so he can hear any mauling and gunfire—then sighs. Puts his hands up on Scott’s shoulders, looks very deeply into his buddy’s eyes, and calls on all his years of lying out his ass to superhuman senses. “Okay. Look. I’m not supposed to talk about this, because Lydia thinks you’re going to get mad at her, but she didn’t like the grass. So we’re redoing the whole backyard.”

Scott stares at him. “The grass. She doesn’t like the grass.”

“Look, I don’t know, frankly, I really don’t want to _care_ , but Lydia.” Who would fully approve, because she understands the difference between throwing somebody under the bus and scuffing them up as a distraction, but who’s still going to extort free lawn care for this. Because Stiles is such a good friend, Scott is only ever going to know about half of Stiles’ actual wedding gifts to him. “And Chris just wants it to look right, so he’s going with it. But he doesn’t want Allison to worry about it, okay, and it does look pretty bad back there right now.”

“So you want me to lie about it?” Scott says. He’s skeptical, but not about the underlying story, and now it’s just gravy from here.

“Don’t lie, just say you have no idea what we’re doing but I said you can’t look, it’s bad luck, no looking before the ceremony,” Stiles says. “And if she says that’s supposed to be the bride on the day-of and I’m making things up, well, I am _totally_ making it up. Because whatever. Chris and Lydia are bad enough, I don’t want to deal with you guys too, okay?”

“Well, okay,” Scott says. Still a little doubtful, but he’s positioning himself to move off the porch, so Stiles figures it’s just Scott’s natural dislike for leaving people in awkward positions (which is nothing a couple ‘Allisons’ can’t fix). “I…well, thanks, Stiles. I’m…not sure what was so bad about the old grass, but Lydia’s just kind of—anyway. Allison really, really wants to have it here, so I’m glad you’re in charge.”

“Hey, what are friends for?” Stiles says. “Only the best for my best bud and Allison. Now, I know you and Allison don’t have the bridesmaid thingy yet, but it’s pretty close to lunch. Were you taking Allison out? Oh, maybe you should grab something on your way back. Allison really likes that chopped salad at Garden of Eden, isn’t that nearby?”

So Scott leaves to go get Allison her greens. Stiles texts Lydia, who sends him back a photo of the landscaper bill for her and Jackson’s mansion, and Stiles sighs and mentally says goodbye to his Sunday afternoons for at least a month.

“…likes the antifungal bath mix,” Derek’s saying as Stiles walks back to the sunroom.

Chris makes a face. “That stuff smells like rotten vinegar.”

“Yeah, but Stiles says the cream doesn’t get—hey.” Derek leans over and scents Stiles as Stiles sits down, because he is a territorial asshole who does that every time Scott gets within five feet of Stiles.

Stiles moves his shoulder out of the way to make it easier for Derek, and sticks his hand into Derek’s back pants-pocket, because he is awful and finds that kind of stuff weirdly adorable. “Okay, Scott’s gone, and he should be pitching in on the hide-this-from-Allison conspiracy, too.”

“Is anybody going to ask for turf samples to match things?” Chris says. He pauses, probably because Stiles is staring and revving up to ask how he knows, and then abruptly nods at Derek. “He was saying. You were telling Scott something about we’re replacing the sod.”

Oh, yes, eavesdropping werewolves, who make life a lot easier for Stiles when they use their powers for helping him instead of just peanut-gallery bullshit (Derek’s sisters, because Peter is big on overlapping cover stories, good little legal practitioner that he is). “If they do, which they shouldn’t, because Lydia is the one who makes matching decisions, just send them to me,” Stiles says. “So how far did you get?”

“You’re going to stick herbs in my yard till you find some that don’t turn into dust,” Chris says. He purses his lips, then shrugs. “Well, you can knock yourself out, but I had half my herbal pots out there, along with what the hedgewitches brought.”

“Your herbal pots,” Stiles says. “You were growing something besides wolfsbane?”

Chris at least has the grace to look a little embarrassed as he pulls out a pen. “Yeah. Give me a sec, I’ll list them for you.”

Stiles waits. And…no explanation is forthcoming. Just the list, which Stiles takes and reads. Then reads again.

“That’s just what I had at the time, it’s not what I usually…I had to deal with a couple minor hexes,” Chris sighs. “But they’re all broken, all right?” 

“So I’ll come by with samples tomorrow,” Stiles finally says. He’s still eyeing the guy funny, because he _thought_ Chris was a competent hunter. But hunting is admittedly not his area (despite Scott’s years of trying to make them all into default ones just to save his do-gooding butt), and anyway, he wants to get onto solving this project before Scott gets nosy again. “Anything else you want to mention? You know, while we’re in prep phase and before we enter into the part that can potentially screw it up worse if I don’t know everything? ‘cause I don’t know about you, but I’m not big on sinkholes.”

“No.” Then Chris sighs. “No, that one just—slipped my mind. The rest of that questionnaire I did for you, it should have everything. Oh, just…I’m going to be out all of tomorrow. I’ll leave things so you can get out back. That work for you?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. He picks up his report, then looks at Derek. “Well, I think that’s all we had. Did he have any questions?”

“What’s that underwater lube we use?” Derek says, in the middle of zipping his copy of the test results back into his bag. Then he starts to get up, and he realizes that Stiles is still firmly set on not-computing. He blinks, then sidles apologetically up to rub his hip against Stiles’ hand.

Grabbing Derek’s ass is _not_ an acceptable substitute for a straight answer. But Stiles isn’t going to turn it down either, okay, so yeah, that, and then Stiles looks at Chris. “When the hell did that come up?”

“Well, I’ve seen reports like this before, didn’t take that much talking through it for me, but you were still busy with Scott,” Chris says. He’s pulling a mildly offended expression, pretty close to what Peter does when he’s about to take your irritation and turn it inside-out for a profuse apology to him. “So we were talking woods work. I just ran a hunt out in a marsh, Derek says you did something with wetland restoration last month. Thought we could trade tips.”

“Right,” Stiles finally says. “Okay. And then underwater lube.”

Chris snorts. “You get your fingers slicked up for a lot of different reasons, Stiles, and I’ve been around long enough to not turn down anything useful. Anyway, I thought it might make you feel a little better about coming over here, too, if I tried to see things from your side.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Derek mutters, because half of that’s him and he’s been getting better about actually facing his issues instead of pulling the stoic act.

“Yeah, well. I appreciate what it means that you’re helping out,” Chris mutters back. Because strong men have to have their emotionally meaningful conversations at nearly unintelligible levels. “It’s good to see that not everybody got wrecked. That was just a mess.”

“Okay, then.” Stiles gets his bag and then tugs Derek, who seems on the verge of dropping the scowl, he’s so deep in shock, towards the door. “We’ll update you when…when there’s an update. Bye!”

* * *

“Yeah, I thought it was weird,” Derek protests. “But I didn’t want to be rude, you’re always saying that I should interact with the clients more, and they weren’t dumb questions. I think he really wanted to know.”

The real estate agent pops back up the stairs, a beautiful advertisement for her dentist plastered over her face. “And as you can see, the upstairs is just as wonderful,” she gushes. “Natural light, two baths, and just _wait_ till you see the master suite.”

“Why is there water damage over there?” Stiles says to the agent, who wilts momentarily, then bounces back with some babble about the new roof and warranties. “Okay, whatever, but did they check the attic while they were at it? Also, Derek, I know I said that, but I didn’t think I’d also have to add that you should not, under _any_ circumstances, feel pressured to talk about intimate details with our clients.”

Derek looks simultaneously irritated and affectionate, in that uniquely prickly, slightly bewildered way of his, like he still can’t understand why Stiles is there. Even though these days he totally follows where Stiles is going. “You’re not going to put pornographic vegetables in his yard after we revive it, are you?” he says. “Because I’m fine with him. I mean, Stiles, I said I’d be cool if you wanted to screw him, didn’t I?”

“And through there are the other bedrooms, although you can see they’ve done that one as an office…lots of options…oh, look, what a lovely skylight,” the agent says, her perkiness straining visibly.

“Pornographic vegetables?” Peter says. “As in shapes? Because Stiles, really, I think we could—”

“As in mating-season mandrakes,” Stiles says. “I’ve been dying to try vegetable sheep in rut, but those are a bitch to transplant and it’s been a lot harder to find people that are that nasty to Derek lately.”

“Ah,” Peter says, completely understanding. Then he turns to the agent and smiles so charmingly that she stops fumbling for something to say about the master bedroom and actually bats her lashes at him. “Thank you, I think we’d like to look around by ourselves for a moment. Meet you downstairs? Oh, Crystal…obviously it goes without saying that we were discussing an app game just now.”

The real estate agent nods gratefully and frantically, and exits down the stairs so quickly that she trips, yips, and then calls desperately up to them that she’s fine, just take all the time they need.

“Seriously,” Derek says over her. “Chris is okay. I never even went to his house before this, because he didn’t mix with the rest of his family, and honestly, sometimes I forget he’s related to them, seeing as he’s actually sane. I don’t know why he’s apologizing _now_ , but I guess if he wants to offer, it’s a good thing. Right?”

“I don’t think that that was an actual apology,” Stiles says.

Peter sighs. “Speaking as the man who has had the most interaction with him, if he’d offered more, then I _would_ believe he’s possessed.”

“But he’s being odd. We do agree on this, right?” Stiles says.

“Because he’s capable of initiating a friendly conversation with Derek, or because he wants to talk about lube?” Peter goes into the master bedroom, then comes right back out, shaking his head. “Wouldn’t fit more than a queen, and they have rosebushes right under the windows.”

Derek glares at him. “That hasn’t happened since I was ten.”

“The windows _also_ face the street. I don’t want to deal with the neighbors calling in burglar reports to the sheriff, how about you, Stiles?” Peter adds pointedly. He grins when Stiles rolls his eyes, but can’t exactly disagree. “Anyway, Chris is hardly a prude, and he’s very diligent about his work. I wouldn’t read that much into it.”

“Well, okay, fine, I will _not_ prank his shrubbery,” Stiles says, throwing up his hands. “Whenever he has shrubbery again. God, those herb tests better not be as weird as the other ones, because Lydia’s starting to make noises like she wants to see my research.”

Peter swings sharply around from where he’s been inspecting a lighting fixture, while Derek snarls under his breath.

“Down, wolvies. She’s not being mean—okay, fine, she’s being mean. But Lydia used to be my research buddy back in the day, she doesn’t want to one-up me, okay? She just wants this off her plate as much as we do,” Stiles says. He’s a little surprised at their reaction. Well, at Peter’s, given that Derek will pull that sort of shit at _Scott_ , who does, in fact, save Stiles’ ass as often as he gets it into trouble (which is a better ratio than Stiles has with him, to be honest). But Peter hasn’t even met Lydia yet.

Mostly because Stiles feels like introducing those two to each other would be the kind of thing they invented the phrase ‘tip the balance’ for, and as much as he likes a good shit-stir, he knows the difference between that and apocalyptic territory. Scott’s wedding and a new house first.

“Anyway, maybe I’m letting my inner pessimist get the better of me,” Stiles says, checking his phone. The master bedroom alone is a deal-breaker, so no point in them hanging around any longer. “Speaking of, garden store just texted, I have to go and pick up the herbs. You guys are good for the other two houses, right?”

“You’re sure you don’t want us to reschedule the tour?” Peter asks. “Of course we’ll take notes and photos, but that’s not really a substitute for an in-person look.”

“Well, you have my ask list, you know what I want,” Stiles says. He steps over for the usual goodbye kiss and cheek-to-throat nuzzle, only to find Peter looking strangely at him.

Then Peter breaks into a big, broad smile, and that’s even stranger because it’s not homicidal, not even a little bit. It’s all…it’s like Stiles just handed Peter the keys to the universe plus a lifetime’s supply of kouign amann, instead of shoving off an annoying chore on the guy.

Peter dips down and rubs all over Stiles’ throat, purring, _his_ throat all up in Stiles’ mouth so Stiles is halfway to biting it without even parting his lips. Stiles…goes with it, because he feels like he’s missing something, yeah, but fuck it, he’s pretty sure if he puts this on the back burner, it’s not going to inexplicably explode on him.

It helps that Derek, at least, is his usual irritable self. “He’s going to try and slip a pool by us now,” he grumbles, almost-lipping Stiles’ neck during his nuzzle. “Why a _pool_.”

“There’s a bad swimming lesson somewhere, isn’t there?” Stiles says. He gives Derek a scruff on the head, and a good goose on the ass, before backing up. “Well, don’t let him, then. And don’t just send him over for dinner with Scott and Allison tonight, asshole, I’m not dealing if Scott chokes ‘cause Peter’s idea of dinner talk involves critiquing the Kama Sutra.”

“He’s a _werewolf_ , he should suck up and deal,” Derek mutters, but he nods. “Whatever, we’ll be there. Call me if they fucked up the herbs again.”

* * *

The store doesn’t fuck up the herbs. Not exactly. They do give the herbs to Stiles in flats instead of the pots that he asked for, but that’s…it’s annoying. It’s not a fuck-up. It’s not one worth calling in a tactical wolf-out on, anyway, so Stiles just packs them into his new jeep. 

The thing is, new jeep. Like, brand shiny new with an oversized red ribbon bow smacked to the windshield, because Derek is bigger and scowlier but he’s still a guy who used to make Valentine’s day gifts out of dead woodland animals and paper hearts, and Peter might snark like a social media intern but he’s never met a showy display he didn’t want to usurp. So Stiles sort of cares if the car gets messed up now.

He has to use all the seats and footspace to avoid crushing any of the herbs because of the stupid flats, and drive like a grandmother to avoid tippage, and so he decides he’ll just drop them off at Chris’ house early instead of crawling like a snail for another five miles. Stiles does text ahead, because surprise visits are great for friends and significant others and enemies, not so much for clients (he fixes their fields, he does not walk in on their adulterous drama).

Chris says okay, and he’s even out front with the garage door open when Stiles pulls up. He glances past Stiles and then his brows tick up.

“I know you’re all buddy-buddy now, but Derek’s busy, and anyway, I’m just dropping off right now,” Stiles says.

“All right,” Chris says, grabbing a flat in either hand. Then he turns and walks up the drive.

He’s not in his usual work-coat, which, much as Stiles appreciates the rough-edge sleekness that gives the guy, having an unobstructed view of his ass is not a bad thing, not at all. Jeans and a thin cotton shirt, which would do anything in Peter’s closet proud in how it hugs what is a very attractively lean body. And…so Stiles had been pushing it off, what with the fucked-up results and the way Chris just keeps pinging the abnormal radar, but damn, Chris is hot.

“Stiles?” Chris says. He’s apparently been standing in the garage for a while. “Do you need these anywhere special?”

“Oh, no. Just wherever, half of them are going to die tomorrow anyway, so I wouldn’t even worry about sunlight. And I had the store water them before I took them, too.” Stiles grabs a flat himself and carries it into the garage, hoping like hell he didn’t have his tongue sticking out or anything like that.

Between the two of them, it just takes a couple minutes to transfer all the flats. Then Chris sees how Stiles is glaring at the soil that’s managed to dribble out onto his jeep’s floor mats anyway, and he offers to go get his vacuum. Stiles is not really in a hurry, and even if he was, he doesn’t really want to go look at more houses, so he says sure.

“So I should’ve thanked you the other day,” Chris mutters, squatting over the vacuum and trying to unclog it, because God, there is a _lot_ of spillage, and when Stiles actually slowed for yellow lights. “For dealing with Scott.”

“He’s not usually that suspicious,” Stiles says. He jiggles the end of the vacuum hose in his hand. “You two aren’t…having some kind of disagreement, right? There’s no reason why he’d be eyeballing you more than usual?”

Chris goes a little stiff. Then he leans back and looks up at Stiles. “I don’t think so. Has he said anything to you?”

“No, but honestly, Scott doesn’t really talk to me about you, period,” Stiles says. He sees the skepticism in Chris’ eyes and raises that by a wagging finger. “That is. He doesn’t say, ‘Stiles, my girlfriend’s dad is trying to shoot me,’ or ‘Stiles, Allison’s father once threatened to pump wolfsbane into my car because she didn’t mention she had a curfew.’ It’s more like, ‘Stiles, yeah, so these bullets I’m pulling out of my bumper? Haha, funny story.’”

“Right,” Chris says after a long silence. He glances at the vacuum, then sighs heavily and pushes it aside. “I wasn’t exactly welcoming to him when they first started seeing each other.”

“I’m pretty sure that wolfsbane gassing comment came up a year in,” Stiles says.

For some reason, Chris looks embarrassed about being caught out. He shuffles a little, rubs at the side of his neck, then looks up at Stiles again. “Look, let’s—yeah, we need to have this talk, but can we do it inside?”

Stiles shrugs. “Well, I guess, but that means I get to choose the weapons, right?”

The side of Chris’ mouth twitches. Then he snorts. He gets himself off the ground, considers the vacuum for a second, then leaves it as he starts up the driveway, motioning for Stiles to follow up. “Depends on which code you’re following. If you’re bothering with one.”

They go into the garage, and then Chris goes on into the house. They’re apparently going to do this in the kitchen, which is just depressingly bare; Stiles and his dad lived for a while by the microwave after Stiles’ mom died and their counters weren’t this clear. About the only thing there is a coffeemaker, which Chris boots up before turning around.

“I do sometimes, but I gotta admit, I usually think they’re outdated and a lot more about looking good than protecting anybody. Which is basically all I give a damn about,” Stiles says. He pulls out his phone and shoots off quick texts to Lydia and to Derek that he’s still at Chris’ house. This probably isn’t going to go bad, and if it does, he doesn’t feel any wards he couldn’t deal with in a pinch, but you never know. Besides, they still haven’t checked Chris out for possession. “So Scott’s told me, repeatedly, that you guys are all good now but forgive me if I keep an eye out.”

“I can’t really blame you in the first place if it’s the same thing I’m doing,” Chris says. He pauses, looking soberly at Stiles, and then puts his hands on his kitchen island and leans forward on them. “Was doing. I did give him my blessing to marry my daughter.”

“Yeah, and I actually do think that you meant it, and that it’s not just some incredibly convoluted scheme to kill us all. Speaking of, if we’re going there, did your dad just get a kick out of having a plot twist once a week? Can’t anybody just go on a straight-up psychopathic rampage anymore?” Stiles says.

Chris tightens his jaw but he doesn’t lean back. “I don’t think I said I wanted to go there. But since we are, you’re not exactly straightforward yourself. It’ll take you another three years, at least, to put together enough projects to claim a single ley line. Even with three of you.”

Stiles blinks hard, then grins at him. “Well, game on. And here I thought nobody was paying attention.”

Except that Chris is already backing off. He slides his hands to the edge of the counter, then pushes away and half-turns to get a couple mugs from the cabinet. He’s a little wary, eyes always on Stiles, but he gives off the impression that’s just standard operating procedure with him. Otherwise he seems a lot more amused than anything. “Anybody with a map and a pencil could figure it out. You don’t even need any fancy GPS software…but we’re getting off the point. I don’t hunt people who aren’t trying to hurt other people.”

“That’s nice,” Stiles says. “But.”

Chris flicks his eyes like he’s going to roll them, and then, at the last moment, drags them back to Stiles. “I hunt people who are hurting other people and who can’t justify it, how’s that?”

“Better, I guess. Although your judgmental tendencies are showing a little,” Stiles says.

“Hunter, comes with the territory,” Chris says. He gets them two cups of coffee and then pushes one across the island. “Stiles. I’m not coming after you, and I’m not coming after Scott. I…” he pauses a second, looking like he’s in actual pain “…get that he really does want to protect Allison. And that they’re both genuinely in love with each other. I just want her to be happy and safe.”

He holds Stiles’ gaze for a couple seconds, then drops it to his coffee. Hunches his shoulders a lot like Derek, whenever the angry face isn’t keeping the world sufficiently at bay and Stiles’ research hasn’t quite pinpointed which traumatic past event it was, and then closes his eyes and rubs the side of his face. And okay, so Stiles kind of feels for him. That shovel talk with Allison hasn’t happened—because _Scott_ had to get all perceptive suddenly and lay down that law, with uncharacteristically thorough consideration of all potential loopholes—but Stiles is still keeping it in mind. Sure, he likes Allison, but there’s no question which side of the divorce he’s going with.

“Okay,” he says. He drinks his coffee and something about that catches Chris’ eye, because the man’s head snaps up and then he stares at Stiles’ mug like…not like he’s poisoned it, but…kind of like he wanted that coffee, or something like that. It’s weirdly hungry. “But I’m kind of curious what that has to do with me.”

Chris blinks hard and the hunger goes away. He takes a sip of his own coffee and he doesn’t seem especially thrilled about it. “It doesn’t,” he says, with a shrug. “I just don’t really see any reason to go after you. You seem to know what you’re doing, you don’t threaten people who didn’t shoot first, and I think a guy who orders as many pastries as you do isn’t about to destroy the whole county with an earthquake.”

Stiles stares at him for a couple seconds. And damn it, but on top of saying that kind of thing (which is, hands-down, the best compliment he’s gotten since Peter passed out _first_ ), he’s got sunlight filtering into his hair, painting that bit of silver at his temples a really soft, buttery gold, like Stiles didn’t already want to lick that.

“So this backyard issue,” Chris says. “You think we can fix it? It’s just—yeah, I know nobody’s really sure they can believe Scott and I are fine. Even Allison still gets nervous when she’s got to leave us alone together. And I really…I want her to be able to trust me.”

He goes a little plaintive at the end there, in a very manly, stiff-jawed, tight-voiced way. And ugh, strong capable guy showing his metaphorical belly, Stiles really has to do something about that vulnerability kink of his. “Scott’s my best friend. And this is his wedding. I’m gonna do what I gotta do. Anyway, I just don’t see what the hell a darach could’ve come up with in the two _whole_ seconds before you shot her that could be so complicated. The herb test should sort it out.”

* * *

The herb test doesn’t sort it out. The herb test is just as schizophrenic as all the other tests. “Sage and feverfew died, angelica’s withered but not dust, and vervain’s growing like a weed,” Stiles mutters to himself, checking his online herbalry for the nth time. “What the hell.”

Then he jerks up off the porch, because somebody’s just whammied the hell out of their brakes. He looks up and Chris stops the SUV while it’s still halfway in the street, then jumps out of his car like he’s about to call down all hell on Stiles.

Stiles grabs for the chalk in his pocket, but Chris grabs the top of the car door and stays where he is. He’s still glaring at Stiles but he’s making an effort to calm down. A lot of effort—Stiles almost thinks he can hear the door groaning under Chris’ hand—and then the guy takes a deep breath and is suddenly all chill again.

“You’re still here,” he calls up to Stiles.

“Uh, yeah, I…didn’t know you needed me to vacate right away,” Stiles says. “You said you’d be out, I figured I had some time.”

Chris presses his lips together. He starts to say something, stops himself, and digs at his pocket like he’s getting his wallet or his phone. He doesn’t actually take out anything, but he glances down like he’s checking whatever it is, and then he looks up and he’s looking less like he’s going to bite off Stiles’ head and more like he’s trying to come up with a non-dumb way to explain how dumb he’s being. “Oh. Well, my business wrapped early…I thought you were planting them and then coming back later.”

“So that _was_ the plan, but some of them started dying right away, even with the wards I put on them, so I did three duplicates just to make sure and it still happened.” Stiles lets go of the chalk and stoops back to get his laptop, and then comes down the porch. He pauses halfway in case it’s some kind of proximity thing, but Chris is all grimly Zen again. “I know I said I’d figure this out, but this is just fucking bizarre. I just—either I’m missing something major, or you’ve somehow managed to land yourself a brand new school of cursing, completely unrelated to any existing schools.”

“Chances of that second one sound low,” Chris says. He’s kind of fidgety, but he’s not exactly making a dash for his house. In fact, he’s edging towards Stiles. “What could you be missing?”

“I don’t know! I mean, we did everything short of radioisotope testing on those soil samples, and I’m pretty sure we would’ve noticed a fucking nuclear event,” Stiles snaps. “And I went and worked over the ley lines again while I was back there, and—”

“Derek’s not with you?” Chris says. He’s a little sharp himself.

Stiles glares at him. “No. We’re not attached at the hip, he’s got a thing. And if you want more lube tips, just email us and I’ll send you a list of brands.”

Chris tenses and his head dips, almost hanging. Then he grimaces and grabs at the back of his neck, and starts pulling at it like he’s getting a migraine. “I didn’t mean—never mind. Do you need—if you’re going to keep working, I can—”

“What the _hell_ am I missing?” Stiles says, half-ignoring him. He turns around and stares at the man’s house. “Soils, ley lines, weather…it was a darach, they’re hooked into fauna but not flora anyway…okay, you know what, there’s one reference I didn’t check. Let me just—no, wait, Peter has it. Shit, I gotta go get it.”

“Okay,” Chris says, backing up towards his car.

So they get in Chris’ car and Stiles gives the guy directions while furiously redoing the ley line chart on his laptop, and three-quarters of the way there, Stiles remembers he doesn’t actually need a ride because he has his own car again. Which is still parked in Chris’ driveway.

Stiles takes a second to call himself on his resurfaced ADD, and then shrugs it off and keeps working on the chart. When they pull up to Peter’s firm’s building, he works on it one-handed and leads them past the receptionist and into the elevator and up to Peter’s office. One kick at the door, no burst of flames (Peter’s do not disturb sign), and Stiles bumps the door open with his hip. “Hey, I need the Sacher-Masoch Codex.”

Peter’s got his feet up on his desk and a magnifying glass in one hand, and a bunch of crinkly, spotty purple mimeographs in the other. He blinks a couple times, then puts down the papers and the glass, and pulls his feet off so that he can reach his desk drawers. “Well, of course. Oh, Chris, what brings you—”

Stiles drops his laptop on Peter’s desk where he can see it, then goes around and grabs the book that Peter’s pulling out, and then opens it while prodding Peter with his elbow. “No, I need to look up something. You don’t have a meeting, do you?”

“Ah. No.” Peter gets up, looking bemused.

He reaches for his tie and Stiles rolls his eyes. Drops the codex on the desk and grabs Peter by the hips and pushes him over the desk, because those three-piece suits wrap Peter up like candy but God, do they take forever to get off. And double that if he lets Peter do it.

Peter makes a sort of startled, questioning noise, but he obligingly tilts up his hips and tightens his belly so Stiles can reach around and get his belt off, then pull down his boxers and pants. “Is this about your yard?” he says to Chris.

“I guess,” Chris says from across the room. The door closes, and then his footsteps come up to the other side of the desk and stop. “Does he need to fuck you to read that?”

“Well, it—” Peter grunts as Stiles plops the codex between his shoulderblades “—depends on which section, some of them you can read without, some of them have text that only shows up if you—”

Peter hisses and jerks away, then flattens himself with a little shiver when Stiles digs a knee into the back of his thigh. So okay, Stiles is kind of rushing it with stretching Peter out, but they’ve had rougher sex. He does reach around and fondle Peter’s balls, which gets him a nice stifled moan and considerably less resistance to his third finger.

“Huh,” Chris says. “Why would you write a book like that? Is that supposed to be a security measure?”

“I think it was more of an ideological filter,” Peter says, with a slow arch of his back. He sifts his hands through the stuff on his desk and braces himself, then sighs contently as Stiles pushes them flush, balls to ass. “If you aren’t willing to embrace intercourse, then you don’t get the fruits of the writer’s, ah, labor, _ah_ , wait, Stiles, I—”

“Can you get me his tie? Don’t untie it, just get the loop off,” Stiles says, scrubbing his hand furiously at Peter’s trousers.

Most of the lube comes off, but he still feels a film when he rubs his fingers together. So he looks around and spots a container of binder clips, and grabs one to use as a page-turner. He flips through the book, watching for the glowing red text. Finds the section he wants, then sticks the clip in his mouth and takes the tie that Chris has helpfully pulled off Peter’s neck for him. Drapes the loop around Peter’s cock, then pulls it tight. Then curses and grabs Peter’s hips.

“Stop moving, you’re making the pages turn,” Stiles snaps, taking the clip out of his mouth.

He stops because there’s a hand hovering over the book. “I could—” Chris starts.

“Oh, yeah, go back three…okay, no, forward one…yeah, there. Thanks.” Stiles frowns down at the page, then reaches out and gropes for his laptop. Pulls it over and starts typing.

“So I…take it…not going well?” Peter says, slightly breathless. He’s doing a little better at not moving, but his ass is squeezing sort of distractingly at Stiles’ cock. But when Stiles pokes him, he just tightens more, so Stiles sighs and tries to just read faster.

Chris sighs. “I have no idea. It’s still a…have you seen photos?”

“Oh, yes, and Derek’s been tracking that dust all over the place.” Peter shifts under Stiles, probably trying to get the pressure off his cock. He manages to hold it for a good minute, but even werewolf strength has its limits, and he subsides with a bitten-off whine. “A darach did that? Really? Also, no offense, but I thought all the old families had curse breakers.”

“Yeah, well, Gerard pissed ours off good and I still haven’t managed to get them to return my calls,” Chris says. “Can we talk about something else?”

So the codex doesn’t have exactly what Stiles is looking for, but it does say that the vervain sometimes experiences an unusual increase in lushness when encountering extreme disorder. Except that whole order-disorder theory got disproved fifty years ago, so Stiles translates that to mean…extremely irregular geomagic patterns. Which means what.

“…buyer’s market, you’d think it wouldn’t be a problem to find a house with built-in fire wards,” Peter’s saying. “Oh, damn, that’s my—Chris, I have a Bluetooth headset somewhere, can you—”

“You said you didn’t have a meeting,” Stiles mutters, flipping through the codex.

“I don’t, Stiles, but that’s the managing partner, still not ready for the coup so I should take that.” Peter rocks very slowly to the side, then settles back with a long, dragging breath. “Damn. Of all the times she has to…ah, thank you, Chris.”

“Yeah, sure. And the fire wards, I get that, half this town’s not up to code,” Chris says. “Insane, really. We might as well be living in paper tents.”

Peter makes an agreeing noise, then changes to a slicker tone to answer the call. Managing partner wants some status update on a deal going down next week, Peter rattles off some legalese and then pushes it to his assistant to schedule a meeting and hangs up. “Where were we?”

“House-shopping sucks, and also, Chris, just checking but you’re the only person living there, right?” Stiles says. Then he curses under his breath, because the glowing red lines are fading. He braces the elbow of his typing hand on Peter’s back, pins the codex with his chin, and reaches under to start pumping Peter’s cock. Which is still hard, not like the tie isn’t doing its job, but stupid trick magic books.

“Yeah. I usually go see Allison at her and Scott’s place,” Chris says. Which explains a little about his lack of furniture, but nothing about his damn yard.

Also, Peter is getting noisy, what with the sucking breaths and slight throaty groans. Stiles tries to reach around and muffle Peter’s mouth, but he can’t do that and keep working Peter’s cock. At least, not without knocking the codex off, so he just sighs. And applies a little nail to Peter’s scrotum, but that just makes Peter moan louder. Peter’s keeping himself still, anyway, and the red text is holding nice and clear now. “So, um, not to pry or anything, but…you haven’t had a date over? In, say, the past three months?”

Chris makes a funny little noise, and when Stiles looks up, the man finally seems weirded out. “It’s an odd time to be tactful, isn’t it?” Chris says, gesturing at Peter.

“Oh, for—fine, you bang anybody within a hundred yards of that backyard lately?” Stiles says.

“No,” Chris says.

“What?” Peter gasps. “Really?”

Chris glances at Peter like Peter’s just smirking the usual asshole smirk, and not desperately crooking his throat at Stiles and leaking little inviting noises. “Work’s been busy, and anyway, if it’s relevant, I’m not looking for one-night-stands these days.”

“It’s not, but hey, whatever fills your life,” Stiles says. He catches that little lift of Chris’ brow and rolls his eyes. “Whether or not you screwed somebody _is_ relevant, okay, I’m not just—anyway, well, fuck, that would’ve explained a lot if you had. But okay, fine, it’s not residual sexual coitus vibes. Damn it. That was the last goddamn thing I could think of.”

So the goddamn codex is pretty pointless, even if Peter wasn’t making a strong argument to push it aside. And Stiles is just so _frustrated_ at this point, he just wants to get something out of the way.

He pulls the tie off Peter’s cock. He’s pushed Peter way longer than this but Peter’s bucking back and shuddering like Stiles has a taser to him before the tie’s even dropped out of Stiles’ hand. His ass clenches down, from hole back up Stiles’ cock, and he arches his neck so sharply that his tendons seem about to rip right through the skin. He makes the same low, begging croon that Derek does, the croon that at this point basically gets Stiles full-on hard all by itself.

Even frustrated as hell, Stiles can’t resist that. He pushes the codex out of the way and leans down and digs his teeth down one tendon, and Peter comes like he’s got the last ticket on that train.

Stiles isn’t quite there, and he doesn’t have the fangs to hold on so he can’t bite and fuck hard enough. He lets Peter slump away from him and pushes himself up by an arm on Peter’s back, grabbing the man’s hip, and ends up looking straight at Chris. Who’s sitting in one of Peter’s guest chairs, pupils blown, looking like his jaw’s going to snap right off if he grits it any tighter.

Chris jerks when their eyes meet. It’s not out of embarrassment, it’s—for a second Stiles thinks the guy’s going to fall out of the chair. It’s a weird angle, all head twisted away and thrown back shoulders. And then Chris yanks himself back, puts his hand up to his face and presses hard. Moves the hand and looks up and he’s extremely irritated. Not at Stiles, at himself—he gives his head an extra smack before he puts his hand down—and then he’s sort of challenging Stiles to say something as he looks over the desk. He takes in how Stiles’ hips are working against Peter’s ass like he’s checking what color the stoplight is, then digs into his pocket. Pulls his phone out and checks it.

Then Stiles comes. It’s probably the most bizarre orgasm he’s ever had, whacking him out of nowhere because he’s just—actually kind of forgotten what he’s doing because Chris is just so _weird_.

“What the hell is with you?” Stiles says when he’s got the breath back.

Chris looks up from his phone. “What?”

“What’s with this—what, is it a point of honor to pretend you’ve seen it all before?” Stiles snaps.

“You mean sex magic?” Chris says after a moment. He glances down—Peter’s sluggishly craned around to watch—and then shrugs. “Well, it’s not like I _haven’t_ seen it used. Did you want me to pretend like it freaked me out?”

“That’s not what you act like, you act like—okay, fuck it, never mind. Your fucking yard.” Stiles props his elbows up on Peter’s back and rubs at his eyes and tries to be a goddamn sex mage, and not some whiny shock-value provocateur. “Okay. It’s not that. Well, then…no, we checked that. And that. And…god _damn_ it. What the ever-living fuck.”

“Chris, I think you might want to go, and give us some time to work on it,” Peter says quietly. “Stiles will call you when there’s a development.”’

“Sure,” Chris says. He draws a hesitant breath, pauses as Peter pointedly clears his throat, and then gets up and leaves.

Stiles buries his face in Peter’s back. “Jesus,” he mutters. “So much for my unbroken string of solves, and it’s Chris fucking Argent. What are the odds.”

* * *

So no, Stiles doesn’t just sulk with his cock in Peter’s ass. He’s better than that.

Okay, so Peter talks him into going out for a mid-afternoon snack, because maybe Stiles’ blood sugar is low, that’s never good for critical reasoning. And then the snack has to come with coffee, because Stiles is looking a little peaked, and then Peter might as well take Stiles home because if coffee isn’t doing it, clearly Stiles has been working himself too hard and he needs a nap. So yeah, Peter nannies him and Stiles lets him. Because hell, nothing else is working.

Stiles crawls out from his nap a couple hours later, and promptly goes for his laptop in a panicked lunge.

“I did the other meeting, it’s okay, we’re on for next week,” Derek says from the couch. He starts to get up and then sits down a couple times, watching Stiles swear and fight with the power cord and some random earbuds. Then he moves his bag off so Stiles can drop on the couch next to him, and leans over to shove a take-out carton into Stiles’ hand and also, start nuzzling at all the little red marks that vicious cord had left. “Also, permits are all good.”

Peter, who’s just coming out of the kitchen with a bottle of wine and a half-eaten summer roll, nods at a short stack of manila envelopes on the coffeetable.

“Great, now we just need to figure out why the hell we need permits in the first p—fuck it, it can wait till I eat. Anybody call?” Stiles says. He looks inside the carton: pad Thai with extra eggy bits, his back-up Asian food kryptonite after spring rolls. “Anybody including Scott or Lydia?”

“Lydia wants to know how we’re doing on the backyard, but I told her you were still over there,” Derek says. He looks a little disappointed when Stiles pulls his fingers out of Derek’s mouth, but that’s Stiles’ chopsticks hand.

“Speaking of, Stiles, has anybody considered artificial turf?” Peter says. He sits down on Stiles’ other side and pours out a glass of wine for himself. Looks at Stiles’ face and then sighs and finishes off what appears to have been a Thai iced tea so he can fill up the Styrofoam cup with wine for Stiles. “Not that I don’t believe you’ll figure out the problem, you still have a couple weeks, but I’m just thinking that having a fallback would take some of the, ah, pressure off.”

Derek ducks his head under Stiles’ arm and snuggles it into Stiles’ lap. Those abs of his don’t slacken up for anything short of taking a concrete pillar to the gut, but he is giving off the air of somebody thoroughly stuffed full of cheap noodles and stir-fry. “I’m pretty sure that Lydia wouldn’t like it.”

“Yeah. I mean, I could probably talk Scott and Allison into some goofy miniature golf theme, given enough alcohol and heartwarming stories from me and Scott’s childhood, but Lydia would impale me on the windmill.” Stiles puts his arm down on Derek’s shoulder, pinning down that growl, and reaches over with his non-chopstick hand to loosely grip the back of Peter’s neck, stopping that scheme. “Can we talk about something else? Is there anything else? I don’t know…house shopping? How did those other two look?”

“No pools,” Derek immediately says.

Peter rolls his eyes over his wine. “ _One_ misbegotten demonstration, over a decade ago, and you develop a life-long phobia.”

“The dead man’s float has nothing to do with paralytic venom, Peter,” Derek mutters.

“I…gotta give him that one,” Stiles says. “Okay. Moving on.”

“Well, I thought this one ticked all the boxes, except that it doesn’t have much of a backyard.” Peter grimaces at that last word like he thinks it’s going to trigger Stiles, then hastily produces his iPad for Stiles to look at. “On the other hand, it’s just down the block from the preserve’s western boundary.”

Nice photos. Whoever took them remembered to shoot the ward anchor points, which look in reasonably good shape. Really big utility room with a convenient little hose in one corner for rinsing off the concrete, double freezers for meat storage…kitchen island already has a blood runnel running around its edge, interesting. Then Stiles scrolls up and clocks the address. “This is way on the opposite side of town from your office. I thought you wanted to keep your current commute.”

Peter blinks hard. Then he shrugs carelessly. Fingers a drop of wine on his lip. “I also want my own library, and sometimes you have to give up some things to get others.”

“It also only has indoor parking space for two cars,” Stiles says.

“There’s a garage down the street I can use,” Derek says.

Stiles lowers the iPad. “Your car. Public parking.”

“It’s covered. They’ve got wind buffers.” But Derek is doing that thing where he tries to pull in his head like he’s a were-turtle, and his leather jacket (which is actually over on the coatrack) is his shell. “I lost the coin toss to Peter.”

“Which was entirely fair, we stopped a passerby and had them flip the coin,” Peter adds.

“That’s…nice.” Stiles puts the iPad down and reaches for his wine, then stops. “Well, we’ve only been looking for what, a few weeks? Is there a reason why we need to lock down already?”

Peter blinks hard again. “No, of course not. It’s just—I thought you said you wanted to move.”

“No, you sneaked it in and I was just, okay, fine, since I’m not really attached to this place and you guys do bitch about having to pay for extra parking and share closets and blah blah blah, so okay, let’s see if we can do better. If we can’t, I don’t know about you but I’m not in a hurry to settle for mediocre,” Stiles says. He pokes at his pad Thai. “Though you guys really like this place, I could park outside.”

“You just got that car,” Peter protests.

Peter is not a fan of the jeep. Peter is not a fan of anything that doesn’t have reclining seats. Peter might have helped buy the jeep for Stiles but that doesn’t stop him from bribing the mechanics to keep it in the shop longer whenever Stiles takes it to get the tires realigned or have the grit hosed out of the undercarriage, because off-roading is rough even when the car’s designed for it.

Speaking of. “Yes, and since you guys went through the trouble to get real military surplus, that means it’s rated for acid rain and hail and toadstorms,” Stiles says. “Between the three of our cars, I’m pretty sure it’s the one who will just need a rewaxing if we leave it outside. Look, it’s really nice of you guys to be self-sacrificing and all but—oh, _shit_.”

Stiles drops the pad Thai and throws himself over the back of the couch, and dives for the holy water he keeps in his bag. Because god _damn_ it, but he’s been slipping lately. 

Behind him, there’s a yelp and a thump from Derek, who maybe got a bit of knee in the face, and an exasperated sigh from Peter. “We’re not possessed!” Derek yells from the floor.

Peter just drapes his arm over the couch and twists around to give Stiles his best, most withering look of disgust, the one that makes paralegals cry and opposing counsel check whether they have tie stains. “Stiles, honestly, if I was possessed by an ancient demon of pure malice and evil, do you think I’d put up with the commission rates for real estate brokers in this area?”

“I think you might engage in a little mutual appreciation,” Stiles says, yanking out the vial.

“Well, all right, possibly,” Peter concedes. “But having to wake up fifteen minutes earlier to get to work on time?”

Stiles has to give him that one. Though he keeps hold of the holy water, because there are a couple other explanations besides possession, and they haven’t ruled those out yet. “Well, then why the hell are you guys acting like. Wait. Wait, oh, my God, are you stealth _alpha_ -ing me?”

Peter blanks out his face. Not because he doesn’t have an excuse or a distraction ready, because he always does, but because that’s what he does when he’s debating whether blunt honesty might be a better course of action and that’s so rare that he kind of has to reset himself to not strain something. “Ah. Well.”

Derek finally drags himself over the back of the couch, scowling and raking his hair back from his face. He’s also positioning himself so he can jump between Stiles and the door. “We’re _werewolves_.”

“But modern ones!” Stiles says. “I mean—I mean, Scott! What about Scott? He doesn’t do this!”

“Scott McCall is _not normal_ ,” Derek says. He runs his hand through his hair a last time, then makes a visible effort to pull back on the predator crouch. Kneads the sectional instead, biting his lip in time with it. “It’s not like we were hiding it from you.”

Stiles stares at him. “You totally were hiding it.”

“Well, we weren’t deliberately trying to manipulate you into it,” Peter says. He pulls his other arm up and puts it so Stiles can see both his hands, all slow clear moves. And he’s looking nervous and like he’s really nervous, not just acting it. “It’s more that you were naturally sliding into the role, just with how you are, and we…well, saw no reason not to let it happen. We’re both happy with it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m—” Stiles cuts himself off. He takes a step back and both of them wince and damn it, that makes him wince. “Yeah. Okay. I don’t know. This is kind of sudden. Usually I _know_ when I’m pulling somebody’s strings, you know?”

“That’s not how it—” Peter starts.

Derek’s dropped back behind the couch, but he pops right up again, interrupting Peter so he can shove something small and black and plastic at Stiles. “Research,” he says.

“Research.” Stiles looks at the flash drive. He rubs his face, then just…puts away the goddamn holy water, because yeah, it’s them. No other entity would be this damn ridiculous. And ridiculously forlorn, God, the little relieved exhale Derek makes when Stiles takes the drive. “Jesus. Derek, okay, did you…did you research nontraditional alphas and put it all together and hope that I’d just be trolling your files and find it?”

“We’re werewolves,” Derek says again. Except quieter and a lot more resigned. “We just know this stuff, I never had to talk about it before.”

And it might’ve been delayed a really long time, but Stiles knew that Derek’s amazing lack of giving a shit about Stiles’ invasive background checks was going to eventually bite him in the ass. 

“So why aren’t you jumping in? Isn’t that your job?” Stiles says to Peter, who flinches. Shit. “Goddamn it, forget I said that, we’re not assigning roles right—oh, God, I am alpha-ing myself now. Fuck. Okay, I’m—I’m going to go read this stuff. Somewhere else. I need…I need to…read. Yeah. Bye.”

* * *

Stiles gets all the way to the lobby of their building, and then realizes that he left his laptop upstairs, so he has no way to get into the flash drive. So okay, he’ll go to his office at the university.

Except he doesn’t have his car. His car is still at Chris Argent’s house.

He considers breaking into Derek’s or Peter’s car, and then realizes that that would be a classic alpha move, just appropriating other pack members’ stuff, and God, he hasn’t questioned his moves on this level of detail since the dark days of high school, when he was still stupid enough to think that altering his social status might get Lydia’s attention. He’s kind of pissed at them just for regressing him that far.

And then Stiles sighs and pulls out his phone and calls a taxi. Because yeah, he’s not gonna do anything till he reads whatever is on the flash drive. He has to hand it to Derek, that was a brilliant move, knowing Stiles can’t resist a known unknown and…yeah. He’s gonna read it. Because these stupid werewolves _do_ that to him.

When the taxi comes, he’s about to have them take him to the university, except that then he remembers he’ll have to call a taxi to take him back and it’s probably going to be early hours at that point, and good luck getting one in Beacon Hills before four in the morning. So he has it take him to his car instead.

The taxi drops him off and Stiles starts to unlock his car door, and then notices there’s a new feature to Chris’ front lawn: a set of bloody footprints.

Stiles does _not_ just go over and check them out. He might not be able to do anything about his urge to poke potential chaos with a sharp stick, but he’s learned a couple things about having gear and back-up on call. So first he gets into his car, and he gets the taser and the bottles of salt and holy water from the glove compartment. The bottles go in his pocket, while the taser gets paired with the flashlight feature on his phone in approved crossed-wrist cop style.

Whoever made the prints was barefoot, and had claws. They go in a straight line from Chris’ car, which is parked in the drive, some mud splashes on the sides but otherwise nothing too weird in or on it, across the lawn and up the front steps. The locks on the front door don’t look tampered with, and when Stiles whistles, the runes circling the door flare softly in an unbroken line.

They’re definitely not Scott’s prints, or Jackson’s, or Derek’s or Peter’s, or basically, any were that has the remotest chance of being at Chris’ house for peaceable reasons.

So Stiles pulls his phone out and calls Scott. Gets voicemail. He taps his phone against his mouth for a second, then tries Allison. Also voicemail. Jiggles on his feet a little, then texts Lydia.

She calls him back right as he’s unraveling the last of the door wards. _“Where’s Derek?”_ she says.

“We’re, um, having a disagreement. Also Peter, too,” Stiles says. “Nothing that big, just…some unexpected…stuff.”

 _“Unexpected stuff,”_ Lydia says, like the words themselves need to shrivel up and die out of the English language. _“Stiles. I can hear you opening a door, so I just want you to know that I am calling in a fake gang of vandals in that neighborhood so they’ll send a patrol car through, and if I don’t hear from you in ten minutes, I’m going to up that to calling your dad. Also, whatever those two morons did, they inexplicably adore your amoral, obsessive, dirt-fucking ass. So please, do not be an impulsive idiot. We have Scott for that.”_

“I love you so much,” Stiles says, grinning, and then hangs up and goes in.

The footprints continue across the entryway and make a beeline for the basement. The door’s already open, and barely hanging onto its last hinge. Stiles gingerly eases past it and then nearly trips himself ass over head down the stairs, because he’s stepped on…what looks like part of a wampus cat fang. It’s bloody at both ends.

Also, the lights are on and Stiles can hear running water and soft cursing. Stiles powers up the taser and swaps his phone for the holy water. “Chris?” he says.

The cursing and the running water stops. There’s a wet slapping sound, like something’s overflowing, and then there’s some—mix of swearing and _lots_ of splashing and these weird plinky noises that probably wouldn’t be too bad on their own, but together sound like a giant bag of coins is being smashed onto the floor. And then there’s a very distinct “Fuck!” from Chris.

Stiles hurries down the steps and goes around the corner, and…that’s about as far as he’s getting before he hits the miniature sea currently taking over the Argent basement. And since he doesn’t want to be the guy who electrocutes himself, he backs the hell up onto a handy chair with rubber-tipped legs, and then he takes a look.

So there’s the remains of an inflatable kiddie pool in the corner, with water and ice cubes spilling out of a big gash in the side. Also sliding around there is Chris, who’s in nothing but some very shredded jeans. He’s got dried blood on his ear, and the water around his hands is full of pink swirls.

Also, his eyes are glowing. And when he sees the taser, his shoulders drop in relief. “Oh, good, stay over there,” Chris says.

“Wasn’t gonna come over,” Stiles says. Though he _is_ going to bend down and hook up that little silvery glittery thing that’s washing up against his chair.

Rune bracelet. Scent masking charm. Heartbeat masking. Calming rune. Anti-fever runes, anti-hunger runes. Mild glamour.

Stiles looks at Chris, who’s gone from shocked to pissed to weirdly chagrined, huddling there in his melting ice pile. “You’re a werewolf.”

“I got cursed,” Chris says. He waves his hand vaguely. It’s got claws on it and he notices and hisses and sticks it under his knee. “Happened before the yard.”

Stiles shakes the bracelet at him. “You’re a werewolf and you’re in _heat_.”

“I’m dealing with it,” Chris says stiffly. He hunches over.

“Dealing with it. Right. Sure,” Stiles says. “You’re what, running around killing unkillable shit and then jumping in ice baths? Oh, yeah, that is _absolutely_ going to get you through, Chris, except _not_ because you can’t just redirect it, you dumbass, you’re supposed to pair that with actually satisfying the urge once in a while and there are these great things called _sex toys_ —”

Chris is kind of pawing at the ice, though he’s still in his defensive huddle and glowering at Stiles like he doesn’t see the obvious, multi-layered fail here. Then he turns up something, which he flicks at Stiles.

A knotting dildo. Stiles looks at it, rolls his eyes, and then just turns off the taser. He hits the ‘false alarm’ button on his phone, puts that away, and gets off the chair and stalks over. 

“Fine, you’re all set for your stupid macho heat, with your guaranteed-hypothermia set-up, stupid fucking werewolf, shifters are _not_ immune to that. You get all of this down here and you what, lock yourself up and don’t tell anybody and not even Allison and does she even know you’re a werewolf? Oh, my fucking God, no wonder she doesn’t trust you! And you don’t tell _me_! The fucking guy who is trying to fix your fucking yard, you fucking heat-stupid furball!” he yells.

The ice-water is cold and Stiles’ sneakers are not standing up to it in the least, and the little cubes make it like walking on marbles, but pure aggravation is a powerful thing and it gets Stiles across the room. Chris skitters back and _he_ slips on the ice, one knee rolling under so that his face almost smacks into Stiles’ foot. So he takes a swipe, except Stiles saw that coming all day and kicks it out of the way and then swings down to grab Chris by the back of the neck.

“You have a heat cycle! You’re actually in goddamn _heat_ , Jesus Christ, I thought you were competent, heat cycles fucking up fertility spells is the one goddamn thing _everybody_ knows about what I do!” Stiles snarls, dragging Chris towards the stairs. The guy’s at least smart enough to just go limp, so Stiles resists the urge to start banging Chris’ head into the wall. “My God, you are an _idiot_.”

When Stiles lets go, Chris is still clear of the wall by a good six inches, but he scoots back against it, scrunching down and pulling his shoulders back. He’s all glowy eyes and fangs-face, and then does a little shake and flinch combo and looks up at Stiles, all human and genuinely ashamed of himself.

“I thought that was just the spellcaster,” he says. He shivers a little and a couple ice chips drop off his back. “Not arguing with you otherwise.”

“It’s not just the caster, Jesus,” Stiles says.

They stare at each other for a couple seconds. Chris is still shivering. He scratches some more ice off his jeans, moving his shoulders awkwardly, clearly trying to think of something to say. Though if he’s looking for something to make this less stupid, no wonder he’s not coming up with anything.

Then Chris suddenly stiffens. His hand rakes across the top of his thigh, splitting through the denim and dragging blood back over his hip, and then he swears and grabs back at the wall, gouging out plaster. “Stiles. I’m—I am actually in heat,” he says in a tight voice.

“And I don’t really think this is working for you,” Stiles sighs, looking around. “My testing’s been fucking up for almost a week now, your heat should be over.”

“Well, it’s my first,” Chris mutters. “And you’ve been having sex all over the damn place.”

Stiles looks at him. “That’s my _job_ , and…damn it, of course. We need to fuck.”

Chris’ eyes do a one-eighty to full-blown lust, but he’s remarkably steady when he answers. Steady and kind of snide. “You have to know that’s not what it’s like.”

“It’s not for you, idiot, it’s for your yard,” Stiles says, exasperated. “No, no, that makes sense of _everything_. The curse, she said your fields will be barren as your heart and you’re newly wolfed and you haven’t had a heat yet. Not that this about love, okay, I really hope you at least got the memo that ‘love’ in magic corresponds to hormone levels and not actual emotional states, because—”

“So—you think the yard’s waiting on my heat to finish?” Chris says.

Stiles pulls out his phone and boots up his ley line app, and runs a couple numbers. “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that…whatever, you want the doctorate-level explanation, I can give it later. Yeah. Pretty much.”

Chris absently ruins his drywall for a couple seconds, taking that in. “Okay.” Then he looks at Stiles. “Not to fucking, Stiles. I just mean yeah, it does kind of make sense.”

“Do you want Allison to have a backyard to get married in or not?” Stiles says.

“Look, I do, but—” Chris pulls his claws out of the wall and flattens himself back as Stiles moves, even though it’s just so Stiles can add hand gestures into his expression of disgust. “What about Derek and Peter?”

“No, they’re okay with it, we talked that one through weeks ago. You’re a free pass,” Stiles says.

Chris opens and closes his mouth several times. Cycles through a couple different expressions. Most of them fall somewhere along the disbelief spectrum, although there’s a flicker that almost seems like regret. Finally he shakes his head. He pulls his arms in across his chest and tucks his hands under them, not that Stiles doesn’t spot their shake.

“Stiles, I’m a werewolf,” Chris says.

“And that’s what you’re going with,” Stiles says. “Not, ‘you’re the same age as my daughter’ or ‘I’m not attracted to you’ or even that classic, ‘I think this is morally wrong.’”

“Because I’m in _heat_ , I can’t pull together my goddamn legs right now, let alone a lie and I damn well do want you,” Chris snaps. “That’s why I’m asking about Derek and Peter.”

“I…don’t follow,” Stiles says.

Chris stares at him. “You’re pack with them,” he says after a moment. Very slow, very dry, like a grade-school teacher reciting the alphabet for the nth time. “You can’t be this stupid.”

“Says the guy who’s keeping off his heat with a kiddie pool of ice,” Stiles snaps, and then things click. Chris starting to whine under his breath and rub his bare, wet feet all over Stiles’ sneakers maybe helps that along. “Wait. Just because I fuck you, it doesn’t mean you’re pack. Scott doesn’t work like that.”

Interestingly, considering which side he was on at the time, Chris growls a little at the reference to that brief break-up when Scott totally did not put his all into considering non-Allison options. “Stiles, Scott isn’t normal,” he grits out. 

He shifts around again, then snarls again, louder and longer. His eyes flash and then he’s on his feet, in Stiles’ face.

“And I don’t want you to _fuck_ me,” he hisses. He’s gnashing his fangs, actually gnashing them, nicking his bottom lip as he talks, and the blood’s like little coals spitting onto Stiles’ face. “I want you to hold me down and knot me, you goddamn—”

Stiles shoves him back, just—just to get him away. Really. The floor’s wet, it’s slippery, it’s not Stiles’ fault his feet slide with it and they both end up against the wall. And it’s _definitely_ not Stiles who is hiking back his chin and making moaning noises, when all Stiles is doing is grabbing the man’s shoulders.

“Wait, I’m your alpha?” he says, blinking. “Is this what that making friends with Derek is about? And that weird second in Peter’s office, and driving me there in the first place, and shit, have you been _scouting_ us?”

Chris manages to shrug awkwardly, even though his hips are humping up into the tiny space between them, and he’s still baring his throat at Stiles. His hands are squeezing at Stiles’ arms and Stiles has to admit his control’s pretty ridiculous for a newbie wolf, no claws or even cut-off circulation. “I wasn’t planning on bringing it up during my _heat_ ,” he mutters. “Or the yard, but—goddamn it, would you either do something or get the hell out of my house?”

“Okay,” Stiles says. “Okay. Right. Upstairs.”

He takes a step that way, and Chris takes two steps into him, and _okay_ , Chris can kiss. Stiles kind of squawks into it at first, admittedly, because he said go up, not hammer a tongue into his throat. But whatever, sucking at Chris’ mouth makes the man a lot more cooperative about where to go, so Stiles goes with it. He gets a grip on Chris’ waistband and neck, and side-steps them off the slick carpet and onto the dry stairs. 

Has to abandon the hold on Chris’ belt-loops and palm Chris’ erection in order to actually get the man up the steps. Chris tries to slam them around a couple times, but now that Stiles knows what the hell filter the wolves are putting on him, he knows how to deal with that. He gets his fingers good and pinched into the hollows behind Chris’ ears, and the one time Chris does swivel him into the wall, Stiles twists so the edge of his hip rides right into Chris’ groin. Which makes Chris sag right off, whining, trying to stretch out his throat into Stiles’ mouth, and then a couple bites along his jaw get him stumbling backwards.

They get up onto the first floor and Stiles lets Chris go first because bare feet, hardwood floor. Chris slips and falls just about where Stiles wants him to, and Stiles lets go so the man has to catch himself.

Werewolf reflexes mean Chris flips around to do that on hands and knees instead of sticking out his arm like a human. Stiles follows immediately after, catching his knee on top of Chris’ back, and then jamming his hand over Chris’ nape to force his head down. Chris struggles for a second, snarling, and then moans and sprawls out, ass canting back into Stiles’ groin. And it’s a really tight, compact ass, just perfect for rubbing into, gross icy-wet jeans aside, but Stiles needs to get a couple things first.

“Goddamn it, what are you doing?” Chris snarls, trying to twist back for a look. He’s tearing up those expensive-looking floorboards of his, clearly hasn’t gotten around to updating all his runework.

“Making a call, shut up, you wanted to know what they’d think,” Stiles mutters, fumbling with his phone. He has to stretch over Chris to keep the man still, even with the neck grip. “Hey! Derek! Peter still—”

 _“Stiles?”_ Peter says, starting off in the background and ending up breathlessly, ear-piercingly close to the speaker.

“Hey, listen, so I’m at Chris’s house and he’s a werewolf and also in heat and he’s totally wanting in on the me being alpha thing too, and tell me you did _not_ know he was checking us out,” Stiles says, hauling himself further up Chris. The guy’s settled some since Derek picked up, but he’s still squirming around.

Derek and Peter are silent. Chris is breathing really sharp and short, grinding his cheek into the floor. His back and arms are flushing right back up, ice bath wearing off, and whenever Stiles’ bare skin touches him, he flinches like he’s been burned and then hisses and tries to press back into it.

 _“No. We didn’t,”_ Derek finally says, in a very flat, very irritated tone. _“Though now that I think about it, that makes sense of a lot of—wait. The yard.”_

“Oh, yeah, he was fucking that up, says he didn’t know. And since he’s been going the bloodbath-ice bath method for dealing with heat, I tend to believe him because clearly he has not been thinking for a while,” Stiles says. Then puts the phone on speaker to get that hand back, and works himself up so that he’s fully lying over Chris, breathing right onto the bits of neck that are showing around his fingers.

Chris shudders at the puffs, then tries to jerk his knees further apart. His jeans aren’t stretchy enough for that and he starts scrabbling at them, then just plain rips open the side-seams. “I—didn’t think—anybody else’s problem—” he mumbles. “Fuck, fuck, can you just—”

 _“I could’ve sworn I told you about my cousin who ended up with a frostbitten scrotum doing that,”_ Peter says.

“Go fuck yourself, Peter,” Chris snaps. Then he whines and sticks his claws into the floor, because Stiles has slapped his hand from his jeans before he cuts off something they both are going to want to keep. He rocks back into Stiles and Stiles rides it, then lets gravity push them back down. Brute blanket’s usually a good move on weres and Chris is no exception, going soft and shaky under Stiles. “Just, goddamn it, can he fuck me? He says it’ll fix the yard.”

“Also, so he thinks that officially makes me his alpha?” Stiles says. He hears the slight inhales on the other end of the line and drags his eyes off where the denim’s peeling slowly off Chris’ ass, and tries to. Get things straight. “So. The whole alpha thing. I’m not, you know, opposed, it’s just I would’ve liked to know.”

Chris snorts in disbelief. “How do you miss—with that with the book in Peter’s office _alone_ —”

Derek makes Stiles’ phone dance a little with the force of his snarl, sending Chris down into a hunch. _“Yeah, we know,”_ he says a second after that. _“That’s…kind of why we didn’t say anything. If you didn’t already know, we didn’t want you to feel like you had to.”_

“I get that. But that means I’m doing stuff to you guys I don’t know about, and that’s not cool. I’m not saying you’re brainwashed babies who can’t make their own choices, okay, but when I poke a button, I want to know it’s a goddamn button,” Stiles says. He absently pushes himself up to let that crumpled-up ridge of denim digging into his thighs slide away, then plasters himself down again. Starts pulling at his own fly, because Chris is getting his jeans wet as hell and he wants them off before they start feeling like gluey sandpaper. “Got it?”

 _“Yeah. Yeah, so…are we good?”_ Derek says, and God, without the scowl to offset, the hopefulness in his voice just does terrible things to Stiles’ ability to be an uncaring asshole.

“Yeah,” Stiles says. Sighs at the muffled purrs he can hear coming from the phone, and then looks at the man pinned under him. “Well, with that. I’m still sitting on Chris here.”

 _“Do you have enough lube? Water?”_ Peter asks. _“Do we need to grab anything else? Electrolytes?_ ”

There’s a short scuffle, and then Derek comes on. _“So I’m…I think I’m okay with it, but I want to know why he’s going with us. And shut up, Peter, whatever you guys did when you were drunk doesn’t count.”_

“We weren’t _that_ drunk,” Chris mutters. He’s gotten his jeans off and now he’s working his naked ass slowly up and down Stiles’ erection, like he’s trying to mold his buttocks around it. His hands keep sneaking in under his belly, and then he’ll take a deep, ragged breath and push them out again, and Stiles isn’t doing anything except pinching his nape. “Give me a break. I need an alpha, and—and you’re stopping to ask them if they’re all right with it, do I have to spell it out?”

“Normally, no.” Stiles starts licking along Chris’ hairline, pausing whenever Chris shivers, and then works his free hand along Chris’ side till he catches a nipple between his fingers. “But I did kind of torture you, back in the day.”

Derek’s not really that sensitive there, and Peter needs to be in the mood and that usually requires a lot of fiddling with clamps and other accessories (not always a bad thing, but it’s time-consuming), but Chris arches up right away. He presses his neck back into Stiles’ hand and mouth, whimpering, then jerkily lifts himself on his knees as Stiles inches fingers further under him.

“What, with those stupid false alarms?” Chris says. “Yeah, irritating, but they got me out of the house. I kind of needed a distract—shit, _shit_ , Stiles—after Victoria—shit, would you please fucking _fuck_ me?”

 _“Derek says he gets it now. Also, are you leaving this on speaker?”_ Peter calls. There’s a lot of banging and rustling noises in the background, and then Derek says something about he’s driving, he’s faster.

“Yeah,” Stiles calls back. Then he looks down at Chris. “So…just how long have you been keeping tabs on me?”

Chris wrenches his head back, and almost gets both eyes on Stiles. Almost. Then he slumps back, breathing uneven, because Stiles is flicking a thumbnail over that nipple. “How long’s Scott been dating my daughter?” he rasps. “For God’s s—Stiles, you always were one to watch.”

“So…you were trying to figure out how to take me out, right? At some point?” Stiles says.

“Couple points,” Chris says, and he doesn’t sound embarrassed or smug about it. Just states it as a fact, right before trying to reach under himself again. He hisses when Stiles grabs his hand, pulls his arm out straight out against the floor. Bows his throat so Stiles’ hand slides up against his jawline, showing the whole rest of it. “But not for a while, you’re a lot better bet than—Jesus—honestly, Talia or Laura?”

 _“That would be a very awkward family dinner,_ ” Peter says.

 _“Only because you’re not the one making it awkward, for once,_ ” Derek snorts.

“And what else, Christ, I’ve already fucked Peter and I think—at least sit down to breakfast with Derek—know what you’re doing with the goddamn ley lines, it’s fine, _somebody_ should manage those things before fucking Nemeton goes haywire again,” Chris half-snarls, half-pleads, hiking his knees up under himself and trying to spread them at the same time. “Just—Stiles—you, can you _fuck_ me?”

 _“Not to rush you, Stiles, but I think Derek would be less likely to plow into a streetlight if he wasn’t holding his breath for that,”_ Peter, the enabling asshole, chimes in.

Well, Stiles is at least getting the lube out. He drops the salt bottle while he’s at it, but that at least doesn’t break, just rolls away somewhere. Whatever, his fingers are slicked, and he goes with two and Chris doesn’t even pretend to flinch, just drives himself back onto them, then droops into an exhale so jagged it’s more fevered than relieved.

“I’m pretty sure you don’t want me to just fuck you,” Stiles says. Three fingers gets him a wince, but Chris is still rolling his hips back into it. He doesn’t even really need lube, the guy’s so wet. He can feel it slicking down from his fingers and he can’t help it, has to reach around with his other hand and yeah, it’s all over Chris’ balls and cock. “I think you said hold you down, right? And knot you, and you didn’t say bite you but I think that was implied. Because you want that, you don’t just want a pretty yard and a good first heat, you want all of it.”

Chris makes small, catching noises when Stiles starts massaging the slick around, working it up towards the precome-smeared head of his cock, then trailing a thumb through the little pool building up behind his balls. He starts getting haphazard with his rutting, knees sliding around for no reason when he’s got all his claws firmly planted in the wood flooring.

“That’s what you were looking at, right? Watching me and Derek, me and Peter, you were checking out the goods,” Stiles says. 

He laughs, sucking at the back of Chris’ neck as he works the guy’s ass. Fourth finger, tuck in the thumb, tilt for the knuckles and then he’s easing his fist into Chris and Chris is taking it the same way he’s lipping at the floor, slack-mouthed, desperate. 

“Making sure you were gonna get what you want, ‘cause that _would_ be how you do werewolf,” he says to Chris’ straining back. “Work it out alone, don’t show anybody your weak spots, except you gotta bare throat, you gotta roll over because _that’s_ it. That’s it, that’s why you’re so fucking stupid about this, you got an empty house and nothing but your job and you’re getting all sloppy with that. Jesus Christ, you idiot, you could’ve just asked or something. Talked Peter into bringing you home for dinner, he’s good at that.”

“Fuck, fuck, Stiles, _alpha_ , now,” Chris gasps.

He actually jerks himself off Stiles’ fist. Just—pops off it. His hips stutter and a couple more wood shavings get added to the little heaps around them, but Chris keeps his ass up. And well, Stiles has never gotten his pants off and his knot up so fast in his _life_.

Chris comes before the knot’s all the way swelled in him, but he’s still fucking himself back into Stiles, whining and twisting himself on Stiles’ cock. He shoves them backwards a couple inches, then gets his claws replanted; Stiles loses his hold on Chris’ for a couple seconds and when he gets his fingers around that again, it’s already half-hard.

Heat’s not actually a mindless fuck-fest for werewolves. At least, it’s not supposed to, if you do it like you’re supposed to and pace it out and don’t fucking just try and put it off. Which clearly has done something to Chris, because he is screwing the shit out of Stiles and he can’t even keep his eyes open at this point.

Stiles scrabbles at Chris’ hip, trying to get the man under control. Then just hauls off and rakes his nails down the man’s spine. He draws just a couple drops of blood but Chris lets out a thin cry like Stiles is murdering him. Jerks to a stop. Tries to start up again, and then loses his rhythm, panting so roughly it sounds like crying, pawing weakly at the floor.

“Okay, okay,” Stiles gasps. He nuzzles and licks his way from one shoulderblade to the other, then lays a bite right between them, just as he clamps his fingers down around the bottom of Chris’ cock.

Chris shakes viciously, drops his head. Gets enough of a voice back to insult Stiles’ parentage, to which Stiles just grins and slowly starts pulling his hand up Chris’ cock again. Slowly. He chews at the tops of Chris’ shoulders when the man tries to fuck into his hand and when Chris stops that, trembling so much his teeth are clicking, he flattens them to the floor and opens up wide and then jams up with his hips at the same time that he bites down.

He comes. Chris would really, really like to come too, says his snarl and jerking legs and madly spasming cock, but Stiles holds him back till Stiles is done. And then a little past that, letting the man settle reluctantly onto his knot, running his free hand down around where they’re joined to play with all the new slick leaking out of Chris’ hole. And then, when Chris is dragging his own throat against Stiles’ teeth, Stiles loosens up his grip, gives the head of Chris’ cock a flick, and there they go.

“Oh, fuck,” Chris mutters a couple minutes later, still slumped over. He sounds like his throat somehow hasn’t healed up. “Okay. This is better than what I was doing.”

Stiles lifts his head from the man’s back, then puts it down and then rolls his eyes, because yes, he is lazy right now. He’s pretty sure he’s earned it. “So, not a counselor, but I wanna point out that heat-fucking doesn’t make pack, and pack doesn’t require fucking, period. I’m not really sure why you think you needed to save yourself, it’s not _really_ like a second virginity—”

“I wasn’t saving myself. Just—it’s awkward timing, even you have to say that,” Chris says irritably. He clenches a little tentatively at Stiles, then relaxes. Then he clenches down harder on the knot. Hums under his breath. “Huh. Yields more than the dildo.”

“Magical means more control,” Stiles reels off. Then he frowns. “So. You and the epic sex poker face. That’s real?”

“It comes up more than you think, Stiles, and I’m a little old to be squealing like a pig about it,” Chris says. He starts…yes, he is actually systematically varying the pressure his ass puts on Stiles’ knot. He does that four or five times, then settles on the clench he likes. “About being a werewolf, I just—really didn’t want to put more on anyone’s plate. Scott’s frazzled enough about the wedding, Allison’s worried about him…and if I went to Peter, I might as well go to you to begin with. I’m pack with him, I do not need him holding that over my head.”

Stiles hears a car pulling up. He pries up his head to check that he left the front door unwarded—he did—and then something occurs to him. “So wait, you said you got cursed this way. What were you doing?”

Chris is facing the floor but Stiles can read the reluctance off the set of his shoulders. And the way he slightly tilts his neck towards Stiles, because werewolves are like pets that way, always thinking they can distract you with potential snuggles.

“Bad hunt,” Chris finally mutters. “Rogue shaman, that feng shui thing I called you about. Got bit by a cursed alpha skull he had around. It’s permanent, I checked.”

“You’re getting cursed an awful lot lately,” Stiles notes, and then the door opens.

Chris jerks up on his arms, snarling. Derek snorts, while Peter just grins all the way from there to getting down on his hands and knees and crooking his neck in the standard scenting invite.

So Chris looks a little cagey about going in, sensibly enough, but he finally dips and lets Peter rub his face all over the spit Stiles has left on Chris’ neck. Peter’s grin gets bigger, probably due to him smelling that, and then he takes a lick at Chris. Who starts, then looks at Peter. Then shrugs and cranes over and licks Peter back.

Peter’s genuinely surprised. It lasts for all of about a second, and then he and Chris are making out like…well, Chris definitely knows about how Peter likes his bottom lip sucked.

Derek rolls his eyes, then drops down by Stiles and tucks his head into Stiles’ shoulder. He’s shivering a little, even when Stiles reaches out and rubs the back of his neck. “Sorry,” he mutters.

“Yeah, well. Just clue me in next time,” Stiles says. “You’re not the only one who’s kind of iffy on surprises.”

“I know,” Derek says. He hesitates, then ducks in for a kiss.

It’s good and long and sweet, and finishes with him rubbing his cheek against Stiles as Stiles lightly bites his neck. Then he drops back so Peter can come up.

Peter’s uncharacteristically slow about it, and drops his head instead of just turning it for the nuzzle. He sags in clear relief when Stiles nibbles at his throat, which makes Stiles pause for a second. Then he pulls back, twisting his fingers into Peter’s hair, and then looks hard at him.

“I’m sorry,” Peter says simply. He looks like he wants to add more, but he just squats there till Stiles sighs and tugs him in for a kiss, too.

“Derek’s supposed to be a grown-up,” Stiles says when they break off. “I just thought it was a little weird, you not getting pushy with him.”

Peter looks a little puzzled, and then he draws in his breath sharply. He ducks down and just presses his cheek to Stiles’ jaw for a second, and then moves slightly so he can breathe deeply against Stiles’ throat. “I was worried about you, not Derek,” he murmurs. “I like you, Stiles, a good deal, and not just as what he brings to the table.”

 _Oh_ , okay…and God, werewolves and their inability to just have a straightforward conversation. “Well, congratulations, you’re not just his smug bastard of an uncle, you’re stupid all on your own,” Stiles says. He gives Peter another tug on the hair, pulling him up to nip hard under his chin, and then gives in and presses a quick kiss to that ridiculously pleased smile. “All right. Now that we’re all on the same page—”

And also, same floor. At some point Derek lost his shirt—expected—and got down next to Chris—not as expected—and they’re tongue-fucking, which is absolutely left-field in the best of ways. Not kissing, tongue-fucking. Chris has his hand curled over Derek’s shoulder, holding himself up so that Derek can jerk off Chris’ cock.

“Hey, watch that, we need to save some for the yard,” Stiles’ mouth says, while the rest of his brain mentally photocopies that image for shitty cold mornings taking soil cores.

Derek’s eyes flick over, and then he tries to say something, which Chris interrupts with a demanding snarl and a rock of his hips that reminds Stiles he’s still in the guy, by way of sudden dancing lights in his vision.

“Oh. Right. We brought supplies,” Peter says, also blinking hard. He keeps looking at Chris and Derek till he gets over to the bag and absolutely has to look down to see what he’s getting out. “So Chris, how long were you pushing it back? The ritual needs you to be able to come twice—”

Chris pries off Derek long enough to grunt, “Not a problem.”

“—with a twenty-minute intermission,” Peter adds.

Derek, to his credit, deflects Chris’ mouth to his jaw, and then helps Stiles roll them onto their sides so Stiles can put his teeth back in Chris’ throat without pulling a muscle. Chris is too busy coming to really care, despite the growl. “I think that might be a problem,” Derek mutters.

Chris pants a couple times. Sees how Derek is looking at his come-smeared belly, and totally cocks it at him on purpose. He is not a robot, and it is glorious, even if it means they’re going to have to wait one more orgasm because there is no way Derek is not taking that challenge. “So what, Peter lost all his cock rings?”

Peter’s mouth twitches. It’s a really, really happy twitch, and he starts unbuttoning his shirt as he pulls more stuff out of the bag. “No, but you can’t have an erection in between either.”

“Fine, cock cage,” Chris says, like they’re talking about swapping out baking ingredients. “Don’t tell me you don’t have one.”

“What the _hell_ were you hunting that that came up?” Stiles says, breaking off on his sucking at Chris’ nape.

Chris laughs. It’s low and rough, and pairs well with how he’s starting to hump back onto Stiles’ knot again. “Not a hunt, are you kidding me? Peter.”

Peter shrugs, doesn’t really hide his self-satisfied air at all, and slinks over to get in where Derek’s licking clean Chris’ belly. “Excellent bourbon, that bottle,” he murmurs.

He pretty blatantly shoulders Derek out of the way, which Derek takes with a surprisingly irritated huff. Then Derek looks over his shoulder, at the candles and meters and sex toys Peter’s laid out. He makes a face, then crawls back up so he can look at Stiles without Chris’ head in the way. “You want me to go set up out in the yard?” he says.

“Uh, yeah, I…holy shit, Peter, watch—um. I’ll be out in a second,” Stiles says, hissing, because Peter is worming his head between both Chris’ and Stiles’ legs, and is following that come and slick trail up to Chris’ hole like it’s a line of honey. “Hey. One thing. Those two, did you…”

“Honestly, I thought they just did shots and then blew each other in the men’s room,” Derek mutters, looking down at Peter’s bobbing head. “Otherwise believe me, I would have said something.”

“Well, that _was_ most of it,” Chris gasps. He arches back on Stiles’ knot, trapping Peter’s tongue up between them for an almost painfully hot, ticklish second, and then shudders down. Hikes his leg back over Stiles’ so Peter has more room. “Usually took hard liquor to stand him.”

Peter pulls out to make a mock-hurt face. “And who brought that liquor?” he says. He ruins it with the smirk when Chris just sighs. “Why did we stop, come to think of it?”

“You wouldn’t stop bitching about Derek’s love life, and I don’t keep that much liquor around,” Chris says. And then he puts his hand down and shoves Peter’s head back between his legs. “Jesus, Peter, come on, I know you can suck harder than that.”

“I should go start,” Derek says under his breath, watching. He eases down on his arms and tilts his head so he’s rubbing his cheek against the side of Stiles’ neck.

“Well, it’s not like he won’t be ready to go again after this,” Stiles says, also watching. And moving with it. “No rush.”

* * *

So eventually, they get Chris into the backyard, and do the ritual, and presto, green grass so thick and lush that it could put a shampoo commercial to shame.

They also end up with three very fucked-out werewolves, and one slightly pelvicly-unhinged sex mage, because Stiles is good but sometimes flesh is flesh. And flesh really, really badly wants to snuggle down with warm, sticky, cuddly werewolves, and fuck the neighbors. But Stiles gets his ass up, and he makes sure that Chris’ privacy wards aren’t timed to go off during the day or anything like that, and then he goes inside because he’s just remembered they never locked the front door.

“Stiles,” Allison says.

“Holy fuck, warn me!” Stiles says, jumping behind an armchair. Then he bites down on a groan, because his knees and hips are not up to that. Not at all.

His arms aren’t really into it either, but he hooks them over the side of the chair and peeks over it, and Allison is really there, and not just a hallucination brought on by exhaustion and incredibly demanding werewolves (Chris is, possibly, worse than Peter, for all that he talks half as much). “Scott was still asleep when I left him,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t think he needs to wake up because Dad went and was an idiot again, do you?”

“Um. I…refuse to answer that question because I have no idea how,” Stiles says.

Allison tightens her arms around herself. She doesn’t _look_ like she has her crossbow on her, but she could certainly be hiding something like a taser.

“Stiles, I’m not…look, is he okay?” she says. She’s half-exasperated, half-anxious.

“He is…in one piece and breathing and I think he’ll be able to talk to you in just a couple hours,” Stiles says. Since she doesn’t look like she’s going anywhere anytime soon, he starts looking around. Then thanks her as she grabs an afghan from the couch and hands it over. “So, um, Lydia?”

“She called and told me about the yard, Stiles,” Allison says, shaking her head. Some of her hair slips into her face and she brushes it away, then sighs and sits down on the chair. “Also, she said you were worried about Dad. Thought he was acting odd, and thought she should mention it even though you sent her the all-clear, and anyway, I thought I’d better come see if he got himself cursed again.”

Stiles breathes a sigh of relief. “Oh, good, you know he’s a werewolf.”

“I’m engaged to _Scott_.” For a second Allison just looks done with it all, and he can’t really blame her. Then she sighs again. She unwraps her arms and just fidgets with her hands in her lap instead. “He hasn’t actually told me. I’m not sure if it’s because he doesn’t know how to say that he’s not going with that part of the family code either, which, God, I’m _completely_ fine with that, or if he’s just embarrassed he messed up another hunt.”

“Yeah, so, about that, how many curses has he gotten now?” Stiles says.

“Enough that my birthday present to him this year’s gonna be an alliance with a new curse-breaker family,” Allison mutters. She rubs the side of her face and looks wearily at Stiles. “You know, the whole deal with having my wedding here isn’t just because I feel like it. I wanted it here because I want Dad to still feel like he’s got me, that I’m not leaving him just because I’m marrying Scott.”

Stiles pulls the blanket around his waist and then sits down on the coffeetable across from Allison, because he cannot keep standing, his knees just categorically refuse. “You guys are literally living two blocks over.”

“I know, right?” Allison throws her hands up, then brings them down to rub at her temples. “He got like this a little after Mom died, except back then, hunting helped get him out of it. But now he doesn’t have me to train, or to worry about, so I think he just doesn’t know what to do with himself. And he goes on these stupid hunts without back-up or enough research because he doesn’t want to bother any of us now. I keep telling him, even if Scott’s not involved, nobody minds helping him, but he just says I don’t need to worry about it and should concentrate on my own stuff.”

“Well, I guess that’s better than him being out and out self-destructive?” Stiles says. When she looks at him, he sighs and spreads his hands. “Yeah. I know. Believe me, I know. People get like that, you basically have to sit them down and whack them over the head till they listen to you.”

“Yeah,” Allison says. She rubs at the side of her face, then rests her cheek against her fist and looks at Stiles. “You’re going to make sure he’s better about that, right? Since you already went through it with Derek?”

Stiles looks at her. Then looks at the nearest patch of runework. Then gets up and walks over to it, and starts checking for embedded eavesdropping sigils.

“Come on, Stiles. Dad needed help with the yard and you’re naked and the driveway’s full of cars,” Allison says. She pauses, then gets a little bit of a pinched look on her face. “Like Scott says, I really, really don’t need the details. Just…you’ll look out for him, won’t you?”

“I feel like you are guilting the hell out of me, and like Lydia said a lot more to you than just, Stiles is breaking into your dad’s house while he’s suffering from a very Murphy’s Law version of empty nest syndrome,” Stiles says. And then he has to give her a reluctant thumbs-up. “Good job, I see you’ve been paying more attention than Scott has.”

Allison smiles at him. It’s relieved and sweet and so, so trusting. “Also the way you check Dad out when he bends over is not subtle, Stiles. But anyway, I’m glad. I think—you know, in a weird way, I think you’re going to be good for him. And if you’re not, I’m _not_ going to tell Scott what happened to you.”

And Stiles has to give her that one, too. He sees her out, with a promise to let her know when Chris is in shape for receiving company, and then he turns on the front sprinklers, because those bloody prints are still there and after the night he’s had, he absolutely does not need the cops and/or his father showing up.

When Stiles gets back to the backyard, the werewolves have half-heartedly started slugging their way across the lawn. Derek’s made it the farthest, and changes his flop over the steps to flop over Stiles’ lap as Stiles sits down on one. Peter’s still half-asleep on the grass, idly picking at the blood and come drying on his thighs, while Chris is attempting to find a way to sit up without actually involving his ass. Stiles might not be an actual alpha werewolf, but it looks like enough betas get in on it, and that accelerated healing takes a nap.

“So that was Allison, she knows everything,” Stiles says, and everybody’s heads shoot up. He smiles pleasantly at them, which gets Peter crawling over with a concerned look on his face, and pushes Derek’s head back onto his knee. Starts petting his hair. “You are _so_ talking to her, Chris, because I refuse to be blackmailed on this one. I do a lot for Scott, okay, I’ve lied, cheated, stole, killed, contaminated evidence, repeatedly violated ethics codes for professions I’m not even licensed in, and I regularly pretend that I don’t mind how his rescue patients shit all over my stuff. But I am not doing that.”

“I…yeah. Yeah, I know.” Chris gives up on sitting and just curls over on his side so he’s facing Stiles. He looks amazingly rueful for a guy who was trying to bend around and bite off the lock to the cock cage by the time the ritual wrapped, and who came shockingly near to success. So the werewolf upgrade works no matter your age when you get it. “Sorry. Was she…was she mad?”

Stiles puts his one hand over his face, and scrunches his other hand in Derek’s hair, then smooths it out. Then repeats, so Derek will start purring. It’s soothing, so sue him. “I’m the alpha of a pack where Peter Hale is the most emotionally mature individual. Jesus.”

“Not that I’m not flattered, Stiles,” Peter says, sitting down on Stiles’ other side. He repels Chris’ glower with sheer brute smugness, then heaves back his shoulders and pulls a serious face. “But being an alpha doesn’t require that you manage everything the pack does. It simply means that…if you lead, we follow.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Chris grunts. He pushes himself up on his arms and edges forward a few more inches, then slumps down with an aching hiss. He digs at the grass with his chin, then drags a hand over his face and the top of his head. “I know, I know, I just…I don’t know, I didn’t really know how to start. But you don’t have to manage me through handling my own daughter.”

“True, but I have this strong feeling that you’re gonna get cursed again if I don’t pitch in,” Stiles says. He pulls his hand down. Then he snorts at himself, because yeah, he needed some space to think it through, but he never really had any doubts where this was going to end up. Sometimes he just needs a little talking into things, and lucky him, he’s got the perfect pack for that. “Also, you pull that don’t worry, I got this hunt shit on me, I’m gonna call it the lie it is and plaster you with trackers. Actually, I’m probably going to do that anyway. Because I appreciate all the research you did, Derek, and I will totally read it, but I’m alpha, we’re doing it my way.”

Peter’s already grinning by the time Stiles hooks him over by the neck. He laps a little at some…smear…on Stiles’ throat, then nestles his head down on Stiles’ shoulder. Stiles glances at Derek, who’s happily smuggled up his neck under Stiles’ petting hand, and then looks over at Chris. Raises his brows, holds out his hand.

Chris purses his lips a few times. His default expression basically is distrustful, but aside from that, he doesn’t really seem put off by the prospect of meddling. Actually, if anything, he seems like he’s wondering when the punchline is going to drop.

But Stiles keeps holding out his hand, and Chris starts to shift back and forth. He glances at the ground, rubs at some dirt on his shoulder, and then lets out a sharp, amused snort. And then he crawls gingerly over. He touches Stiles’ hand with his fingertips, then drops his hand so he can ease himself onto the first step. The curve of his neck slides into Stiles’ hand and he sighs, pushing into Stiles’ grip.

“So, just one thing,” Stiles says, and Chris freezes, then looks slowly up. “You’re committed to this werewolf thing, right? Because—”

“If I was going to shoot myself, I would’ve already done it,” Chris says dryly. He looks around at them, then snorts. The side of his mouth twists up into a wry smile as he leans his head against Stiles’ knees. “First couple days weren’t great, but it gets better. I’ll admit there are benefits.”

Derek tilts his head to frown at the other man. “First couple _days_?”

“Hunter, not like I didn’t know a lot already,” Chris tells him. “I’m still planning to hunt, by the way.”

“Okay with me, just stop getting cursed,” Stiles says. “Seriously. I don’t care how cool you think your massive understatements are, I do not approve. We’ve got books and contacts and supplies, so use them and don’t make me shadow you, too. Or send Peter after you.”

“Is that really a punishment for either of them?” Derek mutters.

“Yes,” Chris says, while Peter just laughs and reaches over to play with the tips of Derek’s hair.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Anyway, just, you know, ask for help?”

Chris sucks in his breath, and then lets it out slowly while moving one shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“Cool,” Stiles says. “Because God knows I do not need more side projects right now. We’re heading into harvest season, it’s going to be busy as hell, and then there’s Scott’s wedding, and finding a house…”

Chris abruptly lifts his head. He looks at Stiles, then at something behind Stiles. Except there’s nobody and nothing—

“It is the right location. It’s even zoned properly,” Peter says after a moment. “And no, Derek, there is no pool.”

“Why do you need a pool?” Chris says. “That’s just a giant mosquito and morgen trap.”

“See?” Derek says.

“Oh, my God,” Stiles says. He looks at them, then at the house. Then he just gives up. “Well, fuck it, that’s one way to make sure the wedding doesn’t screw up.”

* * *

“Stiles,” Scott says, about three weeks later, after he and Allison have successfully gotten hitched on a beautiful, velvety green lawn, surrounded by their loving family and friends. “Do I—”

“No. No, you do not,” Stiles says, and gestures for Jackson to get them those damn champagne flutes now. Chris is busy with the guests, and Derek and Peter still aren’t back from stuffing that interloping siren in the basement freezer. “Trust me on this, bro.”

“Well, okay.” Scott watches Jackson make a face, and then suddenly double his enthusiasm for going their way when Lydia marches towards him with the official photographer in tow, the pair of them arguing bitterly over an iPad. “Stiles?”

“Yep?” Stiles says.

“You’re happy, right?” Scott looks over at him, then grins and slings his arm over Stiles’ shoulder. “I’m glad, man. It was a long road to get here, but I’m glad we all made it.”

“Yeah.” Stiles catches Chris’ eye, then nods at the hunter colleague getting a little handsy with one of the bridesmaids, the half-strega. Chris makes a disgusted face, then excuses himself from his group and heads over, grabbing an iron candlestick as he goes. “Yeah. Me too, buddy. Me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sacher-Masoch refers to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name we derive sadomasochism. He didn't write a sex-triggered magical codex, but he did write the classic novella _Venus in Furs_.
> 
> So most--most--U.S. state bar ethics codes for lawyers prohibit sexual/romantic relationships with current clients; if you're already married when one of you becomes a client, it doesn't count. Funnily enough, not all state bars do (or at least, I know of one where this only applies to family law lawyers). So Peter is totally shady and nobody would hire him in real life, right?
> 
> In the larger universe where this is set, I imagine that Scott does carry on his heroic ways, and regularly faces down all sorts of nutjobs (because Lydia has a photoshoot to manage or Stiles is out on a distant ranch with no cellphone reception), and this set of stories shows what everybody else is doing in the background.


	2. Bonus Scene: Chris, world's only morning werewolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't really have any plans to expand this series, but [baeberiibungh](http://archiveofourown.org/users/baeberiibungh/pseuds/baeberiibungh) [semi-talked me into this](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/44888090).

“It’s six,” Stiles can hear Chris saying. “It’s not that early.”

Derek grumbles and pushes his head up between Stiles’ shoulderblades, doing his damnedest to wrap Stiles around it like a living pair of earmuffs. “What the hell is wrong with him?” he mutters.

“My trap went off, I needed to go check it,” Chris is bitching now. “Just tell me where you packed the tarps, Peter, they’re not in their box in the garage.”

“You brought it _back_ with you?” Peter says. “What is wrong with you? We don’t eat those.”

The blankets stir, mostly off of Stiles. He grabs at the edge right before it leaves his knees bare, then stuffs it under one arm. With the other, he needles his elbow at Derek till his boyfriend growls and twists around and does whatever to get Peter to stop sucking in all the sheets.

“It’s called legal requirements,” Chris drawls. “You know. Those things you charge a couple hundred dollars an hour to advise on.”

“My fee’s well over five hundred, and you’re not legally required to drag your carcasses all over the place,” Peter mutters. “Why didn’t you just gut and sample the damned thing where you were?”

Chris sighs. “Because it started raining, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Well, you’re up at fucking o’clock in the morning, do you really care—ow.” Derek wiggles under Stiles’ arms for a second, then whines and just tries to bury himself in Stiles’ vacated warm spot.

Stiles spares a second to slap the top of Derek’s head, putting a stop to that, and then keeps hauling himself over the other man, and then over Peter, too. Peter grunts and snuffles irritably—and _also_ goes for Stiles’ warm spot. Which spurs Derek’s territorial instincts or whatever, and the two of them end up scuffling up by the headboard, as if they aren’t already ordering pillows in bulk.

“Oh, for…” Stiles bats off some down feathers, then glares at Chris “…when I said okay, no prob if you keep hunting, I didn’t mean get the rest of us into it.”

Chris doesn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed. His shoulders hunch, sure, but he’s all bullheaded return glower otherwise. “I wasn’t planning on it, but if they’re going to keep moving my stuff—”

“Where did you put it?” Stiles says. “Is it still in your car?”

“No, it’s in the freezer,” Chris says, blinking.

Stiles looks him up and down. The jeans are kind of muddy around the bottom, but his feet and above the waist look clean. “You get hurt or anything?”

“No,” Chris says.

“You sure?” Stiles says, waving him over. 

Soon as Chris gets near enough, Stiles slides his hands up over Chris’ belly, which earns him a startled whuff and a stumble that sends Chris grabbing for Stiles’ shoulder. So Stiles clicks his teeth together vaguely in the direction of Chris’ neck, and boom, instincts, Chris drops his head and lets go of Stiles’ shoulder, and has to catch himself against the edge of the mattress instead. While he’s doing that, Stiles gets one hand under his shirt and strips it up to just under his arms, then pulls on it like a leash to get Chris half-onto the bed.

“Damn it, St—” Chris starts.

“Shut up, checking, I totally heard about you hitting up Scott’s mom for gravel removal last week.” Stiles lets go of the front of the shirt, reaches around and yanks the back of it over Chris’ head, and then, while the man’s fighting with that, grabs the back of Chris’ jeans and starts peeling them off him.

Chris pops his head free of his shirt, then glowers at Peter, who’s won most of the pillows but who now abandons them to a miffed Derek. Peter snakes over the bed, keeping his head lower than Chris, and starts playfully shoulder-butting the other man; he’s smug as hell about it, but he’s also got soft sleep-mussed curls and a way of cocking his ass that can be mesmerizing under the right conditions.

Which include now, judging by how Chris’ eyes keep going to it. “I couldn’t find the damn tweezers and didn’t want to drive home with rocks in my feet,” he says under his breath. He’s still crawling further onto the bed without any urging from Stiles, pulling himself out of his jeans. “Okay, are you hap—”

Peter leans over a little too far, making a mock-strike for Chris’ nape. He pulls that kind of jerkass trick all the time, to the point that Derek will just slap it off without even looking up, but Chris isn’t so used to it and he rears up. Puts his waist right where it’s easy for Stiles to twist around and grab it, and then let their body weight carry them down.

“Can we go back to sleep now?” Derek mumbles, watching from his new pillow kingdom.

“Stiles,” Chris grunts. He twists weakly around, pushing at the blankets, and then shivers and curls up as Stiles starts mouthing the back of his neck. “You’re _not_ checking.”

“What, I am too,” Stiles says, and works himself up against Chris’ back so he can just sling one arm around the man. They’ve landed half on their bellies—well, Chris is more on than not, but Stiles still has a hip on the bed, and he uses that leverage to hump Chris up and get his other arm under the man, and a nice, pointed hold on Chris’ cock.

Which, Stiles notes with a nip at Chris’ throat, is totally interested. Chris grunts irritably again, because manly hunters can’t leave gutting for after breakfast, and then subsides with a soft, wistful noise. His hips tilt back into Stiles, and when Peter sneaks in for a nuzzle, he only bites the guy once before they settle into a sloppy, slow make-out session.

“Not sleeping.” Derek lets out a disgruntled huff, then drags what feels like all the pillows with him as he snuggles up to Stiles’ back. “’n gonna get back to sleep now.”

“Three other bedrooms in this house, you know,” Chris mutters, lapping at the underside of Peter’s jaw. He’s starting to rock his cock into Stiles’ hand, and when Stiles just tightens his fingers, Chris whimpers and lifts his chin so both Stiles and Peter can suck at his throat.

Derek snarls at him, this lame little thing that’s half-sigh, and then slides down Stiles’ back. His hair brushes over the back of Stiles’ thighs, then tickles a jerk out of Chris as he starts working his head between Stiles’ legs and nosing into Chris’ buttocks.

He gets Chris all good and slick and open, and then helps lever Chris back onto Stiles’ cock, and by that point Chris is way too distracted to be snippy. Actually, Chris is kind of annoyingly urgent, considering it is _still_ goddamn six in the morning, but between Peter and Derek he gets held down so Stiles can just laze his way through fucking the guy, rolling up into the climax and then flopping into the comedown.

One of the others, probably Peter, takes care of getting Chris off, too, so Stiles can just doze to the breathless little moans and grunts. He does wake up when Peter keeps moving around, but Derek reaches over and does something, and that stops. Derek’s a little more considerate, just presses his head hard into the back of Stiles’ shoulder while jerking off, and then he beds his head into the dip of Stiles’ waist, letting out a nice satisfied purr as Stiles drags a hand back to pet him.

“What if I left it in the car?” Chris has to mutter.

“Fuck your car,” Stiles says. He nudges his cock, which is still in the man, till Chris gasps, and then bites at Chris’ shoulder. Then he sighs, and drags up enough energy to raise his head and bump it against the back of Chris’. “You didn’t, right?”

“No,” Chris says. He hitches his hips, then groans as his ass shudders around Stiles’ cock. “Shit. Shit, you really can sleep like this?”

“Well, if you’d just relax and learn to get used to it,” Peter grumbles. “We’re nocturnal, Chris, you’re allowed to sleep in now.”

“I like mornings,” Chris says. Sounds a little plaintive, of all things, although he is definitely not trying to get away. “I can get so much done.”

Derek growls into Stiles’ side. “Shut up. Fuck mornings.”

“You get up in two hours, it’s _still_ morning,” Stiles adds. “Goddamn werewolves.”

Both Peter and Derek make whiny little protesting noises, because yeah, yeah, not their fault, whatever. Stiles ignores it, and just pushes his face back against Chris’ nape. He wills Chris to just stop moving, and…well, Chris shifts himself a last time, letting out a long, slow breath, and then hallelujah, he does. Thank God, Stiles thinks, and goes back to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obviously, now that Stiles is alpha-ed up, the first thing to go is morning meetings, unless the magic really, really requires it.
> 
> Everybody technically has their own bedrooms, but they just use it for storage and pile into the master with Stiles.


End file.
